He doesn’t hate them when they agree with him
The Post reports the unsurprising news that Trump’s verbal attacks on scientists are not helping the response to COVID.
This week’s remarkable character assault by some top White House advisers on Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, signified President Trump’s hostility toward medical expertise and has produced a chilling effect among the government scientists and public health professionals laboring to end the pandemic, according to administration officials and health experts.
From Trump’s point of view that means it’s working. He wants them chilled.
Though Trump does not automatically distrust the expertise of public health officials, he is averse to any information or assessment that he considers “bad news,” that compromises his economic cheerleading message or that jeopardizes his reelection, according to several administration officials and other people with knowledge of the dynamic.
A distinction without a difference. “Trump doesn’t object to the expertise when it agrees with him.” Well no kidding; that’s the problem.
In addition to Fauci, the White House has repeatedly undermined and sidelined the CDC over the last several months, which prompted four former CDC directors to pen an op-ed in The Washington Post this week that argued no president had politicized the CDC to the extent that Trump has.
We don’t want to be exterminated by a gruesome torturous disease; that’s not political, it’s just basic survival.
Two of the White House officials with the closest and longest-standing ties to Trump, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and trade adviser Peter Navarro, attacked Fauci this past week. Navarro penned an op-ed in USA Today in which he stated that Fauci was “wrong about everything,” while Scavino shared a cartoon on social media mocking Fauci as “Dr. Faucet,” drowning Uncle Sam with a deluge of “extra cold” water.
… Fauci said the push to discredit him was “bizarre,” telling the Atlantic, “If you talk to reasonable people in the White House, they realize that was a major mistake on their part, because it doesn’t do anything but reflect poorly on them.”
If you can find any reasonable people in the White House.
“It seems that some are more intent on fighting imagined enemies than the real enemy here, which is the virus,” said Thomas R. Frieden, a former CDC director and president of Resolve to Save Lives.
“The virus doesn’t read talking points,” Frieden said. “The virus doesn’t watch news shows. The virus just waits for us to make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, as Texas and Florida and South Carolina and Arizona did, the virus wins. When we ignore science, the virus wins.”
And when the virus wins – this is important – lots of people die, and lots of other people survive but with life-altering damage.
Trump in recent weeks has been committing less of his time and energy to managing the pandemic, according to advisers, and has only occasionally spoken in detail about the topic in his public appearances. One of these advisers said the president is “not really working this anymore. He doesn’t want to be distracted by it. He’s not calling and asking about data. He’s not worried about cases.”
That could be good news, because it could mean he’s interfering less. But as a fact about him – it’s execrable. Don’t worry about all these people dying on your watch, dude! Go play golf!
The irony is, if Trump had dealt with this aggressively from the beginning, and managed to keep the number of deaths very low while other countries were soaring, it would have helped his reelection. He could have bragged about it. But he didn’t do anything, because he doesn’t know anything, and no one makes him do anything. You couldn’t solve the problem of the virus by hiding it in mashed potatoes, so it was allowed to run amok. Now Trump thinks he can just stop counting it, and no one will be bothered by it anymore. Voila, problem solved!
The thing is, as our supply chains continue to collapse, as Americans find it more difficult to find food and other things in the stores, as they start to fall ill and die, it will become increasingly obvious the problems that arise from dealing with the virus in such a slipshod manner. And a lot of people will realize there are a lot of things more problematic than the economic problems that come from shutting our economy down for a time.
“You couldn’t solve the problem of the virus by hiding it in mashed potatoes” – very good.
@iknklast I agree with you, this wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if he had just appointed a commission of scientists from NIH, CDC, plus JHSPH etc. He could have just sat back, let them make the recommendations, tell the appropriate government departments to implement them and had lots of press conferences praising himself. The media would all nod along, and there would be newspaper articles and cable news gushing over how well he was handling the crisis. He could still have claimed he was overseeing the commission but without doing anything. He’d appointed the best people etc etc.
Now of course there isn’t a cat in Hell’s chance he would have done this. And honestly, I don’t think the US is psychological capable of the kind of compliance you saw in Germany. It’s just not in the national makeup.
I kept wondering where the public tipping point would be, the moment when the American people would be stunned by the sheer volume of cases or deaths. My original guess was 10K cases, but that swept by unnoticed. OK, maybe 100K, that’s a big number, surely people will start to be concerned now. Nope. Then a million cases. How could you ignore that? Apparently by pretending it’s not that high, the books are being cooked.
Yesterday there were 3.7 million case. New cases are rising at a rate of 78K per day and that rate continues to increase. And 145,000 people have died.
The 1918 flu killed 50 million people globally, 675K in the US. In 2 years. The US is on track to reach those kind of numbers if we don’t get ahold of this thing right now. The R0 of the 1918 flu was around 2. The R0 of COVID19 is in the range of 2.5. (https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laninf/PIIS1473-3099(20)30484-9.pdf)
We can’t wait for it to burn itself out. Relying on remdesivir to cure the ill is stupid, it’s expensive and not usually made in large quantities. Shortages will occur. The only answer is the public health answer. And we can’t wait for a hoped-for Biden presidency.
Washington state set a record today for new infections. My county is probably going to go back to Phase 1 (we are currently in Phase 2 of four phases of reopening). Inslee (our governor) is doing the right things, but the counter-messaging coming from Trump is convincing the naysayers that they can do whatever they want.
James Garnett, I suspect Trump created what the naysayers want. They may not have held a strong opinion about the masks prior to Trump’s messaging. I think he has created this situation more than exacerbated it. He made it personal; he made it about him; he made it an issue to divide along, rather than unite behind doing the right thing.