The United States heads for a presidential election later this year, but the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak drives home the importance of this race, not just to America, but also to the rest of the world.
At a political rally last week, Trump called the outbreak of COVID-19—which has killed almost 3,000 people and infected more than 87,000 people in 59 countries—a hoax.
“The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” Trump said. “They’re politicizing it. One of my people came up to me and said: ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That did not work out too well. They could not do it. They tried the impeachment hoax… This is their new hoax.”
Before a White House press conference on Saturday—just as the first confirmed COVID-19 death in the US was reported—Trump repeatedly played down the threat, and echoed his allies in the conservative media who accused his political opponents and the media of overstating the threat to make him look bad. One of these Trump allies even had the temerity to dismiss COVID-19 as “the common cold.”
Trump then praised what he called “the most aggressive action in modern history to confront this disease,” and asked the media and politicians not to do “anything to incite panic.”
His son, Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, accused the Democrats of hoping that COVID would hit the United States “and kill millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning” and said this represented “a new level of sickness.”
US Vice President Mike Pence, put in charge of the belated US response to the global threat, even defended Trump Jr.’s remarks, saying they were “understandable,” given the level of criticism that his father has received.
Still, it is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic has caught the Trump administration flatfooted.
While other countries had already tested tens of thousands of people for COVID-19 by early February, Pence said on March 1 that 15,000 test kits were on the way, and 55,000 more were on order.
We can only attribute this inaction to a President who is in denial, his general disregard for facts and science, and his lack of foresight.
Before COVID-19, the Trump administration eliminated an office in the White House to deal with future outbreaks of pandemic diseases, which he said was set up during the Ebola crisis in West Africa from 2014 to 2016. The top White House official in charge of responding to pandemic diseases left the Trump administration in 2018 and his team was disbanded in a shake-up of the National Security Council.
Pence, who once wrote that “smoking doesn’t kill,” is now in charge of the American response to a growing, global pandemic. This is hardly a cause for optimism.
Given the high stakes involved, we can only hope that a majority of Americans have the good sense to elect a more competent, facts-based leader in November, instead of the dangerous demagogue who now occupies the White House and lies about a public health emergency simply so he can look good. Now that’s the real hoax.