On October 2, 2020, President Trump and first lady Melania Trump announced that they had tested positive for COVID-19 after traveling unprotected with communications director Hope Hicks to the presidential debate and to a campaign rally the following day where she developed symptoms. In fact, officials now believe it was the Rose Garden ceremony held on September 26 to introduce Trump’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court that was the super-spreader event which began the sequence. As usual in Trump’s entourage, nobody wore masks, and at least twenty people have since tested positive. Also of concern is that fact that the President spent 90 minutes on the same stage with his democratic opponent Joe Biden, putting him at risk, too.
Unfazed, the President took further advantage of situation — after three nights of elite medical care at the Walter Reed Medical Center receiving experimental steroid treatment — by driving around town in a hermetically-sealed vehicle with secret service agents who are now required to self-isolate, then flying home prematurely to stage a photo op on the White House balcony. Still infectious, Trump removed his mask in defiance, saluted, and entered the building spewing COVID germs to all those around him. He also tweeted a disrespectful video in which he had the gall to tell followers not to be afraid of COVID or to let it dominate their lives. It was the latest setback to the nation’s attempt to control the coronavirus and one that epitomizes the degree of arrogance, recklessness, and irresponsible behavior exhibited by the President in the face of a world pandemic. As unbelievable as it may seem, the White House has become a figurative and now literal COVID-19 hotspot.
It would be unfair to attribute all 210,000 American deaths (as of 5 Oct 2020) from COVID-19 to President Trump, but to consider his performance worthy of an A+ grade as Trump has publicly touted is sheer lunacy. In fact, medical statisticians have suggested that failure to act swiftly and properly may have cost the country half of its COVID deaths. Clearly Trump’s cavalier approach to the coronavirus in which he often worked against medical professionals made matters even worse. As a result, it seems safe to assume that he has cost the US about 100,000 lives — the most by any president in history, and a far cry from the one death Trump blamed on President Obama during the Ebola virus that, he tweeted, warranted Obama’s resignation. For months, Trump contradicted the CDC and his own virus taskforce by deliberately downplaying the severity of the virus. He repeatedly advised Americans that it would magically disappear on its own, fabricated bogus timelines, vigorously advocated prophylactic use of the anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, even though it was unproven and later shown to cause serious side effects, and encouraged his constituents to ‘liberate’ against the apparent oppression of his own medical advisors’ guidance to wear masks in public.
His administration was ill-prepared for the virus even before Trump’s misleading statements, because Trump had eliminated the entire pandemic response team in 2018 in either a myopic, minimally cost-saving measure or yet another act of spite to reverse course on Obama-era programs. Moreover, despite repeated requests by medical officials and state governors left on their own to compete against each other, Trump never invoked the Defense Production Act to secure critical medical supplies and have them distributed in an organized fashion in accordance with need. Perhaps most egregious was Trump’s refusal to wear masks in public either out of vanity, shear stubbornness, or some pathological desire to sow discord and chaos in the country by creating a political issue at the cost of American lives, even going so far to hold indoor rallies while ignoring social distancing and mask wearing norms.
And to make his handling even more egregious, Trump reportedly knew how deadly the virus would become well before anyone else. Instead of telling the truth and giving people the information they needed to act responsibly as adults, he chose to distort the facts and blatantly lie to the American public under the guise of trying to prevent panic. Such a brazen attitude and poor leadership in the face of imminent danger was unprecedented, as if Trump knew better than everyone else that Americans couldn’t handle the truth and were safer hearing a sugar-coated, fictitious story than worrying about an infectious virus. It’s hard to imagine any widespread panic costing 210,000 lives, but apparently for Trump, the downside of being forthright with the American public was far worse than the virus, itself.
Now, eight months into the pandemic, Trump accepts no responsibility whatsoever that USA leads the world in cases and deaths by a landslide, claims his swift preventative measure saved us millions of lives without basis, and points full blame at China for creating and releasing what he calls the China-virus, remarks that are culturally-insensitive and needlessly provoke anti-Asian sentiment in the country he is supposed to unite.