During the Presidential debate on Tuesday night, two days before Donald Trump and the First Lady, Melania Trump, tested positive for the coronavirus, Chris Wallace, the beleaguered moderator, asked the candidates how the pandemic had changed the way that each campaigned. He noted that Trump, unlike Joe Biden, his opponent, was holding big outdoor rallies—why? “Because people want to hear what I have to say,” Trump said, as if there were no other consideration. He claimed that as many as forty thousand people were waiting for him at airports—a wild exaggeration, though several thousand have regularly gathered for the mostly maskless hangar rallies—and that the only reason that Biden wasn’t holding rallies, too, was that “nobody will show up.”
“Are you not worried about the disease issues, sir?” Wallace asked.
“So far, we have had no problem whatsoever,” Trump said. “We’ve had no negative, no negative effect.” Hope Hicks, one of his senior campaign advisers and a former aide, whose symptoms and positive test triggered the President’s test, had travelled with him to a number of rallies. Perhaps if Trump had known about her diagnosis, and his own exposure, when Wallace asked the question his answer would have been different. But what does it say about the sense that only his own health, and not that of the people in the crowds, would register with him as a “negative”? That people travelling with him as he hopped, in the past week, from Florida to Minnesota—who would have followed him to a planned rally this weekend in Wisconsin, where cases are rising at alarming rates—might test positive is not an unexpected fluke. (Indeed, a number of Secret Service agents already have; Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, who often attends such events, announced on Friday that she had tested positive two days earlier.) There is a pandemic in this country, one that the President has failed to control. There are more than forty thousand new cases of COVID-19 each day, and the average number of deaths per day is still above seven hundred.
Trump’s negligence about the coronavirus is of a piece with who he is. By the end of Tuesday night’s debate, it was easy to wonder just how many forms of violence Trump might be willing to inflict on the country, from heedlessly telling quasi-militarized white supremacists to “stand back and stand by” to urging supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.” When Wallace asked if he was telling people to take to the streets, he didn’t deny it. He was ready to expose Americans to another source of physical harm: the unmanaged pandemic. “You got to open these states up. It’s not fair!” Trump said—meaning, presumably, that not doing so was inconsiderate of his electoral prospects and his vanity. The reality that, with children returning to school and cold weather on its way, the next weeks will require vigilance and delicate coördination to head off a truly devastating winter, seems lost on him. Instead, he complained that Democratic governors were deliberately waiting until the week after the election to reopen, for no reason other than that “they think they’re hurting us.”
On Friday morning, Biden tweeted, “Jill and I send our thoughts to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery. We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family.” That message, with its kindness, is a reminder of how the pandemic has made the contrast between Trump and Biden particularly clear. It has thrown into relief some of the most basic things about each of them as people and as politicians—how much each of them cares, their honesty, and their willingness to work, among other things. Both decency and competency are required. When Trump, in explaining during the debate why he had backed shutdowns earlier in the year but would not do so again, said, “We’ve found that elderly people with heart problems and diabetes and different problems are very, very vulnerable” and that “younger people aren’t,” he made it sound not as if the vulnerable and elderly had to be protected but as if they could be written off. Remarkably, he did not seem to place himself in either category, even though he is seventy-four and overweight. That might serve as a broader reminder to Americans about our curious national narcissism, which can dull not only empathy but self-preservation. Of course, Trump’s statement about the basic medical facts was wrong, too; younger people can die or experience debilitating cases of COVID-19. (And, as a groundbreaking, large-scale study from India confirmed this week, even young children can play a significant role in spreading the virus; earlier studies had reached similar conclusions.)
Biden, during the debate, looked directly at the camera and asked people watching, “How many of you got up this morning and had an empty chair at the kitchen table because someone died of COVID? How many of you are in a situation where you lost your mom or dad, and you couldn’t even speak to them, you had a nurse holding the phone up so you could, in fact, say goodbye?” Early on, in the opening exchange about the Supreme Court, he connected the pandemic to the Trump Administration’s backing of a case, soon to be heard by a Court that will probably include Amy Coney Barrett, that was brought to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. “The deal is that this is going to wipe out preëxisting conditions,” Biden said. And that matters to a new cohort of Americans. “Over seven million people have contracted COVID,” he said, and added, “What does it mean for them going forward, if you strike down the Affordable Care Act?” It’s a question that should resonate in both red and blue states—and even among some staffers in the White House.
When Wallace asked each man to speak for two minutes about why he would do a better job than his opponent in managing the pandemic, Biden said something that even many of the President’s supporters must suspect is the case: “The President has no plan.” Indeed, until now, Trump’s only pandemic plan, such as it is, has been to talk his way around the crisis long enough to get reëlected—furiously concocting excuses, making up numbers, pushing conspiracy theories involving China or Democratic governors, overpromising on a vaccine, disparaging anyone who disagrees, and, when all else fails, boasting that two hundred thousand dead is still less than the two million dead that some models had suggested could be the death toll in the United States, if no measures at all had been taken. He also mocked masks.
It’s not news that Trump has told corrosive lies about COVID-19; according to a new Cornell study, Trump is the single greatest source of false information about the pandemic. The tally includes both conspiracy theories and quackery, such as Trump’s suggestion that the White House coronavirus task force explore the internal consumption by people of household cleaners, such as bleach. (“That was said sarcastically,” Trump claimed in the debate; a review of the video indicates otherwise.) Clearly, this is not what White House doctors will recommend: Trump will no doubt have the best care in the world. The best scenario for the country would be that a healthy Trump is voted out of office by an equally healthy margin—to have the Trump era end because Americans reject Trumpism, and not because the virus gets more of a say than they do. It may be too optimistic to suppose that, meanwhile, his coronavirus experience could make Trump an even marginally more prudent President. But it could prove to be an education, if not a revelation, both for him and for his supporters.
More on the Coronavirus
- To protect American lives and revive the economy, Donald Trump and Jared Kushner should listen to Anthony Fauci rather than trash him.
- We should look to students to conceive of appropriate school-reopening plans. It is not too late to ask what they really want.
- A pregnant pediatrician on what children need during the crisis.
- Trump is helping tycoons who have donated to his reëlection campaign exploit the pandemic to maximize profits.
- Meet the high-finance mogul in charge of our economic recovery.
- The coronavirus is likely to reshape architecture. What kinds of space are we willing to live and work in now?