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It’s hard to talk about Donald Trump’s record on COVID-19 without sounding an exaggeration. That’s because the documented facts are so terrible: Trump has consistently deceived the public and interfered with every element of the government’s response, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths that, according to his advisers, were unnecessary. Each new examination of this disaster provides more evidence of the treachery of the former president. The latest information, revealed by Washington Post reporters Yasmine Abu Talib and Damian Paletta, revealed how behind the scenes Trump tried to hide the crisis to protect his image.
Aboutaleb and Palita present their findings in a new book, “A Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to a History-Changing Pandemic.” The book, which is based in part on interviews with former Trump administration officials, won’t be available until June 29, but excerpts quoted in the Washington Post describe several incriminating episodes. In at least two cases, Trump has attempted to prevent infected Americans from setting foot in the United States, not to prevent the spread of the virus, but to prevent infections from being counted as part of Trump’s record. In one case — Trump’s opposition to allowing 14 Americans to return from a cruise ship, the Diamond Princess — the authors added behind-the-scenes details: Trump complained to Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, that returning infected Americans “doubled numbers overnight.” The authors state that Trump attempted to fire the official who approved the decision.
The book also reveals a second, previously unreported episode in which Trump repeatedly suggested that Americans infected abroad be shipped to the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “Don’t we have an island that we own?” Trump asked his aides. What about Guantánamo? The word island was central to Trump’s idea: according to the authors, he was “keen to suppress the numbers on American soil,” and believed that people who had been turned away from the mainland wouldn’t count. In either case, infected citizens could have been placed in quarantine at facilities in the continental United States. This would have hindered the spread of the virus, but Trump, he said, saw the presence of such people on the mainland as a “statistical” threat to him.
Trump’s biggest concern was testing. By producing test kits for the virus and giving them to a growing number of Americans, doctors and the government were gradually making sure the crisis was widening. Trump was upset by this progress — he said it made it “look bad” — because he believed that if people were not tested, their injuries would not be counted and not counted against him. The authors reported that in a March 18, 2020 phone call, Trump told Lazar, “Testing is killing me! … I’m going to lose the election because of the test! What a fool for the federal government to test?”
Trump and his aides have underestimated and resisted various life-saving public health measures. The book states that Mark Short, a veteran Trump aide who was then Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, opposed a plan to send free masks to every household, on the grounds that it would alarm the public. Senior Trump officials have mocked the masks, likening them to a “training bra” or “underwear on your face.” Short also opposed the economic shutdown that slowed the spread of the virus in March and April 2020. On the rare occasions when Trump pushed his subordinates to move more quickly, he did so for personal benefit rather than public health: In the fall, according to the book, he attempted to impeach the FDA commissioner. Stephen Hahn for refusing to use FDA scientists in approving COVID vaccines before Election Day.
One of the stories in the book is more important than it might seem. In late March 2020, Robert Kadlake, a senior HHS official, went to Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to come up with a plan to distribute the masks widely. When Kushner learned the masks wouldn’t arrive until June, he exploded. “We will all be dead by June,” he told Kadlec. In a retelling of the post, this conversation appears as a story of delay and frustration. But it’s worse than that. It shows how particularly dangerously Kushner and others in the White House are viewing the crisis, while Trump has been telling Americans that the virus will soon be gone.
The Washington Post did not specify a date for Kushner’s outburst, but publicly, Trump has been downplaying the virus during this time. “It will disappear,” he assured the press on March 30. “We are doing a great job.” The next day, when a reporter noted that Trump had “calmed Americans into a false sense of security,” Trump replied, “It’s going away. It’ll be gone, hopefully at the end of the month.” On April 3, he repeated, “It’s going to go away.” “It’s going to be gone, and it won’t last long,” he added a week later.
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Days after Kushner’s own eruption over the shortage of masks, Trump dismissed doctors’ complaints that they did not have enough masks. “We have masks. We have everything. We are in good shape,” Trump told reporters on April 10. Contrary to Kushner’s fear that “we are all going to die by June,” Trump has publicly insisted that the risk of death from the virus was exaggerated and that it was Well .more important to reopen business and strengthen the stock market.
Trump did not personally kill the 600,000 Americans who died from COVID-19. But he achieved this result in every possible way: by downplaying the threat, opposing efforts to track and control the virus, mocking masks, and launching political attacks on conservatives who tried to save lives. At large scales, it is the most deadly betrayal of American citizens by their president. The massacre would have been worse, according to the authors, had it not been for the “enormous efforts made to prevent Trump from acting on his worst instincts.” The more we learn, the worse the story gets.
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