Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them

To the extent that President Trump discusses those who have died, he does so in self-justifying terms,
framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been worse without him.

In just the past few days, President Trump has blamed immigrants, China, the “fake news” and, of course, “the invisible enemy” of the coronavirus for America’s present troubles. He has opined extemporaneously about his plans to hold a grand Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall and has announced that he planted a tree on the White House lawn in honor of Earth Day. He has offered his opinion on matters small and large, bragged about himself as “the king of ventilators,” and spent much time lamenting the pandemic-inflicted passing of what he invariably (and inaccurately) calls “the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

Despite the flood of words, though, what has struck me the most this week is what Trump does not talk about: the mounting toll of those who have died in this crisis. So voluble that he regularly talks well past dinnertime at his nightly briefings, the President somehow never seems to find time to pay tribute to those who have been lost, aside from reading an occasional scripted line or two at the start of his lengthy press conferences, or a brief mention of a friend in New York who died of the disease soon after calling him at the White House. “He said, ‘I tested positive.’ Four days later he was dead,” the President recounted. “So this is a tough deal.” It was not exactly the prayerful, if often politically expedient, mournfulness Americans generally expect of their elected leaders. Trump, for the most part, dispenses even with the ritualistic clichés that other politicians, regardless of party or creed, have always offered in times of crisis.

But the numbers are the numbers, and, notwithstanding Trump’s relentless happy talk, the coronavirus epidemic has, as of this week, already produced some fifty thousand American dead. This is not, needless to say, a best-case scenario, or anything close to it. Just a few weeks ago, a survey of scientific experts predicted forty-seven thousand U.S. dead by the beginning of May, according to the Web site FiveThirtyEight. Instead, forty-seven thousand deaths were recorded by this Wednesday, April 22nd, well before the experts had anticipated. On April 8th, a leading model at the University of Washington had revised its projections downward to forecast a total of sixty thousand American deaths by the beginning of August. But the nation now looks to hit that number by May 1st, meaning that, just a few days from now, more Americans will have died from covid-19 than the entire toll from the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Trump talks of reopening the country, and of the “tremendous strides against this invisible enemy.”

You would think that no amount of Trumpian misdirection could disguise the awful fact that America has more confirmed coronavirus deaths than any country in the world, and that many of them might have been prevented by earlier, more decisive government action when the President was denying that the coronavirus even presented a threat to the United States. But Trump is trying his hardest to ignore the covid-19 deaths. To the extent that he discusses those who have died, he tends to do so largely in self-justifying, explicitly political terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been much, much worse without him. Earlier this deadly spring, Trump was briefly scared into a more sombre public presentation by projections that showed hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. deaths if no preventative actions were taken. Now he cites the absence of those worst-case scenarios as proof of his own brilliant handling of the crisis. The numbers of dead citizens he throws about, meanwhile, seem to be abstractions to a President who believes that even the subject of mass death is all about him. “If we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a million, a million and a half, two million people dead,” he said on Monday. “You would have had ten to twenty to twenty-five times more people dead than all of the people that we’ve been watching. That’s not acceptable. The fifty thousand is not acceptable. It’s so horrible. But can you imagine multiplying that out by twenty or more? It’s not acceptable.” Trump did not pause to offer any sort of regret or sorrow, and instead claimed that the entire death toll in the United States would end up around fifty or sixty thousand as a result of his heroic moves. Of course, this was not true; that is, essentially, how many have already passed away.

Honoring the dead has long been one of the tests of American Presidential leadership. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was, after all, not just another political speech but a remembrance of those who were killed in the bloodiest single battle of the Civil War, in which some fifty thousand Americans became casualties and about eight thousand died. Twenty-five years ago this week, Bill Clinton’s lip-bitingly empathetic response to the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a white supremacist blew up a federal building and killed a hundred and sixty-eight people, was seen as a key moment of his tenure. He was dubbed the “mourner-in-chief,” at a time when he was languishing politically. That speech is often said to have saved his Presidency. More recently, Barack Obama wept from the White House lectern in speaking about the deaths of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, and gave arguably the speech of his lifetime in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, singing “Amazing Grace” as he mourned at a funeral service for nine African-Americans killed by a white supremacist at a church massacre. Even those Presidents who aren’t particularly good at speechifying—think of the two George Bushes—have considered public commiseration amid national tragedy part of the job description. Have we ever had a President just take a pass on human empathy, even of the manufactured, politically clichéd kind?

Trump’s departure from normal behavior is often most painfully evident during his nightly briefings, when his persistent disregard for the dead stands in stark contrast to the manner of others in his Administration. Dr. Deborah Birx, the State Department official who has been named White House coördinator for the pandemic response, often mentions the human toll of the disease and thanks the medical caregivers risking their lives. On Wednesday, Vice-President Mike Pence began his brief remarks with a nod to the “loss of more than forty-seven thousand of our countrymen.” It was just the sort of thing you would expect Pence to say, and yet notable for how different it sounded compared with the President. Trump began that very same briefing by saying “our aggressive strategy to battle the virus is working.” It is, he said, “very exciting, even today, watching and seeing what’s happening.” What was happening, though, was another day on which more than two thousand Americans died of the coronavirus, a fact that Trump did not mention. We know what a normal President would do and say at such a time. He would comfort the afflicted, weep tears of sadness, whether real or not; he would rally the country, or at least seek to. It is hard to write about the absence of something but especially necessary in this case, with a President like Trump, who has relentlessly used his public platform to discourage the contemplation of how deadly the disease has proved. His fear of the political consequences to himself that such contemplation might engender is painfully transparent.

On Thursday, I left my house for the first time since my once-a-week, socially distanced trip to the grocery store a couple days earlier, and drove through the empty streets of Washington, D.C., passing the shuttered headquarters of massive federal agencies and the silent white bulk of Trump’s executive mansion. Everywhere I looked, there were flags flying at the top of their flagpoles, and few if any people. Determined as he is to avoid any kind of reckoning, Trump has not even ordered American flags lowered in tribute to the dead, although individual governors have decided to. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy did so in early April, as did Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York. “We recognize those who have been lost to this terrible illness and all those affected by it. Many families cannot hold funerals for their loved ones at this time. By doing this, we remind them that their losses are not forgotten,” Murphy said in a statement announcing the move. Trump, who has in the past personally asked for the flags to be lowered after a shooting or a politician’s death, can’t even bring himself to do this much for victims of the coronavirus.

During my drive home, I turned right on Constitution Avenue, normally crowded with cars headed out to Virginia, and parked for a couple minutes near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The national parks are closed, too, and no one was there to look at the more than fifty-eight thousand names of the American war dead inscribed on Maya Lin’s V-shaped black granite monument to them. Will the victims of this deadly spring one day have their names recorded on some grand Washington pile? I doubt it. Trump calls himself a wartime President, in his battle against the virus, but, like all politicians, he is more eager to speak of victory over the enemy than of the costs of winning. The Vietnam memorial was not built until 1982, seven years after the last U.S. troops left Saigon. The dead from this war may have to wait even longer.

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Trump’s Pandemic Plan: “Absolute Authority,” No Responsibility

Since the start of his Presidency, Donald Trump has claimed the

“absolute right” to do an astonishing array of things.

The novel coronavirus brings out the same old, same old President.

A week ago, President Trump foreshadowed his growing anxiety over when and how to end the Great Shutdown, a decision he is well aware will have existential consequences—for his own political future. He called the question of reopening the country amid the coronavirus pandemic “the biggest decision I’ll ever make” and “by far the biggest decision of my life.” Yet by the time Trump advertised a “Major News Conference” for Thursday evening, there was little suspense from a man who has been tweeting about a “LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL” and who declared, on March 24th, that he wanted church pews “packed” by Easter. Trump backed off the Easter deadline within days of promoting it, and he repeated the act this week, with a May 1st date and a new plan for “OPENING UP AMERICA AGAIN,” which started out on Monday as an imperial diktat from an almighty President and ended up on Thursday as a mere recommendation to individual states, without a fixed date. Many governors have already announced that they will not follow his guidance. “You’re going to call your own shots,” Trump reassured them on a conference call on Thursday afternoon, according to an audio recording, which promptly leaked. “You’re going to be calling the shots.”

This might seem a head-spinning reversal. But it is classic Trump. His two most memorable lines of the covid-19 pandemic, proclaiming “absolute authority” and “no responsibility at all,” are wildly contradictory, and yet also completely consistent with his approach to governing. The novel coronavirus is truly a new type of American crisis, but it has been met by the same old, same old from America’s President: unhinged press conferences and unfounded conspiracy theories; lies, attacks, and bizarre non sequiturs; and abrupt, seemingly incomprehensible policy shifts from a leader who has no problem changing course at the expense of his own credibility.

A few weeks ago, Trump declared war on an “invisible enemy.” Now he says that he is beginning “the next front in our war” after “incredible progress” has been made. This grandiose proclamation came on a day when more than two thousand Americans died. On Wednesday, a record twenty-five hundred people died. As of Thursday, more than twenty-two million Americans have filed for unemployment since the pandemic began, a shattering statistic that came out the same morning that the Small Business Administration acknowledged that its three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar bailout program was already out of money. The I.M.F. now forecasts a severe recession for advanced economies like that of the United States, lasting into next year. Horror stories abound: dead bodies stashed in an empty room at a Michigan hospital; seventeen corpses hidden in a New Jersey nursing home. Yet Wall Street has had a good week. That, and signs of incipient conservative backlash against government restrictions, symbolized by a handful of protests in several Midwestern states by Trump-sign-toting crowds, are the data points the President seems to prefer.

A few weeks ago, during Trump’s reopen-by-Easter flirtation, he admitted that he based the new deadline on nothing more than his gut and how “beautiful” it would be. Now he offers a “science-based reopening” plan, which includes a vague and uncertain three-stage path for states to resume everyday life. Yet the main precondition for doing so—widespread testing—is not only not in place but, according to Trump, not his problem. “The federal government shouldn’t be forced to go and do everything,” he said on Thursday evening. This might as well be his slogan for the crisis, and for his entire Presidency: ultimate power and no responsibility.

Trump started the week by declaring, at his Monday press conference, “The President of the United States calls the shots.” In a rambling, outrage-filled performance that began with what appeared to be a Trump campaign ad featuring his Fox News confidant Sean Hannity and ended with his sweeping assertion of executive power, Trump claimed that he had the total authority to override governors and singlehandedly determine whether, when, and how each state would reopen its economy.

Reactions to that press conference, which, at two hours and twenty-three minutes, was the longest of Trump’s covid-19 briefings so far, were swift and harsh. The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, called him a wannabe “king.” The USA Today Washington bureau chief, Susan Page, tweeted, “I’ve covered six Presidents, but I’ve never covered any White House briefing quite like the one tonight.” Robby Soave, an editor at the conservative Reason magazine, called it “an utterly unhinged, childish temper tantrum.” Jim Acosta, the CNN reporter who often spars with White House officials, said it was “the biggest meltdown I have ever seen from a President of the United States in my career.”

Trump provokes superlatives—his public persona seems to require them—but it’s clear we’ve lost the vocabulary for what to call these incidents, which are not in fact outliers but recurring features of his Presidency. Search “unhinged Trump press conference” online and numerous examples pop up, from the February 6th White House “celebration,” after the end of his Senate impeachment trial, to an August 21, 2019, performance at which he insulted the Danish Prime Minister because she would not sell him Greenland. The spectacle of an infuriated Trump ranting at the press corps has become a sort of totemic ritual of this bizarre era, going back to the very first official press conference of his Presidency. Held on February 16, 2017, it was an impromptu affair in which Trump rebutted reports of chaos in his White House (“The Administration is running like a fine-tuned machine,” he said), called the Trump-Russia probe “fake news,” bragged about his television ratings, and denied that his attacks on the press showed he was out of control. “I am not ranting and raving,” he said. “I’m just telling you know you’re dishonest people.” When it was over, CNN’s Jake Tapper tried to sum it up. “It was unhinged. It was wild,” he told viewers. More than three years later, the coronavirus shutting down virtually the entire planet is a novelty, but Trump holding an unhinged press conference, alas, is not.

Given how extraordinary the events of the past six weeks have been, you might think Trump would put aside his previous preoccupations or rewrite his own playbook to accommodate the deaths of thirty thousand Americans. But you would be wrong. He has continued to attack “Crazy Nancy” Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, with whom he has not spoken since the end of his Senate impeachment trial, and even did so just hours before Thursday’s press conference, at which he solemnly intoned about the need for Democrats and Republicans to work together. At his daily coronavirus press conferences, Trump has complained about being taken advantage of by European allies and touted his wall with Mexico, themes that he has stressed since he first took office. Even in making the most sweeping claim of his Presidency, to have “absolute power” over the states in the pandemic, Trump on Monday was not so much making a novel assertion as reverting to one of his favorite rhetorical devices.

From the start of his Presidency, Trump has claimed the “absolute right” to do an astonishing array of things. Indeed, the list of those previously undeclared and previously unknown Presidential rights and authorities is so long and disparate that the only thing they seem to have in common is the fact that Trump has claimed to have them. In just the past few months, the President has asserted the “absolute right” to fire the intelligence-community inspector general, whose handing of a whistle-blower complaint eventually triggered Trump’s impeachment, as well as the “absolute right” to interfere in the federal sentencing process of his friend Roger Stone. Last winter, he asserted the “absolute right” to ask “Other Countries” to investigate corruption, which is the President’s description of his interactions with Ukraine that led to his impeachment.

Many of Trump’s claims to “absolute” power, however, have proved to be exactly the sort of bluster that accompanied his overblown rhetoric this week: he wants to be seen as all-powerful in the fight against the pandemic, but without actually exercising the powers he purports to have. This, also, is vintage Trump. He has, after all, previously asserted the “absolute right” to order American businesses out of China, to eliminate the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and to shut down the U.S.’s entire southern border without ever actually doing any of those things. Trump repeatedly said he had the “absolute right” to fire the special counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, although he never did so. He also said that, had the Mueller investigation worked out differently, “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” He has not done that yet, either. Just this week, Trump asserted his power to unilaterally adjourn Congress, a power which has never before been exercised by any President. Has there ever been another President to articulate a view of the Constitution as sweeping as the one that Trump asserts? “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President,” Trump famously said last summer.

President I Can Do Whatever I Want may not have reckoned on a virus as his enemy, but these past few weeks of national emergency have displayed a Trump who has never been more Trumpian. He is the same flawed President he has been for the past three years and eighty-nine days. His political playbook is the same. He has no new moves. He has not grown, or even changed much, in the office. Nor will he.

Susan B. Glasser

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Trump, Truth, and the Mishandling of the Coronavirus Crisis

The Administration’s stumbling response to the pandemic was, alas, no surprise.Photograph by Jason Redmond / Reuters

The best of modern Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, believed in the responsibilities of government and the realities of fact. Despite his place in America’s patrician caste, he suffered the consequences of an earlier epidemic, and he derived from it a code of empathy and endurance. In August, 1921, when Roosevelt was thirty-nine, he came down with polio while at his summer retreat on Campobello Island. From then on, he was unable to walk and could stand only with the aid of steel-and-leather braces that reached from his ankles to his hips. His ambition and sense of mission, however, would not be denied. At the 1924 Democratic Convention, Roosevelt—sweating profusely, swaying slightly at the rostrum—spoke for thirty-four minutes and set off an hour-long demonstration of cheering and the choruses of “The Sidewalks of New York.”

Four years later, Roosevelt became the governor of New York, and, in 1932, he was elected to the first of four terms as President. The quotation that defined his temperament was revealed in his first Inaugural Address, which he delivered as the nation faced the “common difficulties” of a Great Depression and the dawning of Fascism in Europe.

“In every dark hour of our national life,” he said, “a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.” In asking Congress for the authority to “wage a war against the emergency,” Roosevelt fearlessly answered what his biographer Jean Edward Smith called “the spiritual need of the people, the need for hope, not despair.” The next morning, he commenced what he had promised, a radical campaign to rescue the economic well-being of the American people.

The crisis that has now enveloped the nation is a vastly different one—a pandemic called covid-19. The Presidency that faces it is also a vastly different one. Donald Trump’s ascent has been framed by two of his most characteristic remarks: “I alone can fix it” and “I don’t take responsibility at all,” and the journey from one to the other has been long and excruciating.

Confronted by crisis, Trump’s response has been to minimize it, downplaying the realities of the new coronavirus while bragging about what an “amazing” job he’s been doing. He squandered the most valuable resource in a pandemic: time.

When the virus was first identified, in January, Tom Bossert was one of several prominent voices in the realm of emergency preparedness to sound a warning. “We face a global health threat,” he said on Twitter. The problem was that Bossert—a Homeland Security adviser and an official with deep experience in emergency management—was a former Administration figure, having been pushed out last year. Scott Gottlieb, who called for immediate preventive measures, including the closure of public venues to slow the spread of the virus, was another such voice, but he was the former head of the Food and Drug Administration under Trump.

“What the American people need to brace themselves for is a large rate of sickness and death in this country,” Bossert told me. Actions to reduce the spread of the virus, and the timing of those actions, will have profound consequences. Bossert recalled the decision by Philadelphia authorities during the Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918 to allow a Liberty Loan parade to raise money for the war effort. On a late September day, two hundred thousand people marched up Broad Street and, at parade’s end, listened to a concert by John Philip Sousa. Within three days, the cities’ hospitals were overflowing; thousands were dead. “Bodies stacked like cordwood” became the phrase of the day. In St. Louis, by contrast, officials took quick, extreme measures to close schools, churches, theatres, and playgrounds––the measures that we refer to in our new language of pandemic as “social distancing.” In the end, the per-capita death rate from influenza in St. Louis was half that of Philadelphia.

It is a saddening experience to read Beth Cameron’s recent account, in the Washington Post, of what happened to the office she led during the Obama Administration: the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. In 2018, the Trump Administration closed it. Cameron writes that she was “mystified” by the decision, one that left the United States less prepared for pandemics such as the current one.

When Yamiche Alcindor, a reporter for “PBS NewsHour,” asked the President at a Rose Garden press conference last week why he shut down the office, Trump’s response was evasive and petulant: “I think it’s a nasty question.” Testifying before Congress, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, allowed, “It would be nice if the office was still there.” You had to wonder why Trump didn’t replace Fauci with Elizabeth Holmes.

Bossert, who has been pressing for a far greater sense of urgency since January, said he did not want to spend too much time criticizing anyone for actions taken or not taken in the early stages of the crisis. “While there are myriad questions that are legitimate about the Administration’s timeliness and decision-making processes, the President nevertheless did us a favor this week by yelling ‘fire’ while there is still time to do something about that fire,” he said. “That is critical. While the fire is still on the stove, you can’t sit back and watch it burn. It will spread.”

The Trump Administration has been more interested in setting fires than in investing in fire prevention or containment: it has been eager to dismantle the “administrative state,” to upend a raft of international agreements (notably the Paris climate agreement and the nuclear pact with Iran), and to reduce spending for science, health, the environment, and emergency preparedness. Expertise has offended Trump. He has found his enemies not among foreign dictators but among members of the American “deep state,” including career diplomats and intelligence analysts, as well as university teachers, journalists, congressional Democrats, and “disloyal” Republicans––dissenters of all kinds. His circle of loyalists is so lacking in policy expertise that the writing of his speech on the coronavirus from the Oval Office last week was left mainly to his nativist immigration counsellor Stephen Miller and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

The Administration’s stumbling response to the pandemic was, alas, no surprise. Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico, in September, 2017, and left three thousand people dead, was at least as shambolic. Now, as he tries to craft a response to covid-19, he remains, at best, distracted by ego. Just hours before the Oval Office speech on Wednesday, he went on Twitter to complain about “another phony & boring hit piece” in Vanity Fair.

In a rational universe, Trump would have no chance at reëlection. But, even if the Democratic Party front-runner, Joe Biden, despite all his flaws, runs a coherent, competent, and dignified race, there are no guarantees. Is it a stretch to wonder whether Donald Trump has given thought to postponing or otherwise derailing the November election? Just days ago, Vladimir Putin had his loyalist legislature amend the Russian constitution to allow him to remain in office, if he wishes, until 2036. Trump did not protest, and no one expected that he would.

Pretexts for postponing the election are not hard to conjure. There’s no shortage of public-health officials warning of the possibility of alarming medical and social conditions ahead, especially if a second surge of covid-19 arrives in the fall: overrun hospitals, soaring rates of infection and illness, a stalled economy. Thankfully, Trump would face significant, probably insurmountable, obstacles in trying to alter the date of the election. Federal law demands that the ballot take place “on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in every fourth year succeeding every election of a President and Vice President.” The Constitution requires that a new Congress gather on January 3rd and a new President be sworn in on January 20th. Legal scholars agree that, even if Trump appealed for emergency powers, he would not have the authority to put off the election.

From the start, Trump has made loyalty to the Leader, not to the law, the ultimate value in government service. In June, 2017, he presided over a Cabinet meeting that made it clear that the ticket of admission was not competence or truth-telling but rather a self-abasing fealty to him. One by one, with the exception of James Mattis, Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and Vice-President spoke of the great privilege of serving an omniscient and very stable genius. It was a tableau that might have seemed over the top in the highest councils of Ashgabat or Pyongyang. In fact, the picture has grown only worse since impeachment, as public servants, who, rightly or not, thought they could guide Trump away from his worst instincts, have been swept from the White House stables.

Once more in the history of this disturbing and destructive Presidency, we depend on democratic institutions, on civil society, on decent men and women of competence and perseverance, to safeguard American democracy and the commonwealth. What gives hope in this crisis is the way that society has responded to the pandemic with a sense of sacrifice and relative calm. What gives hope is a medical professional like Helen Chu, an infectious-disease specialist, in Seattle, who found a way around bureaucratic barriers and led a team of colleagues who conducted crucial tests. It was an act that undoubtedly saved lives. What gives hope is someone like Anthony Fauci, who has the political finesse not to risk the temper of the President but who also has the expertise to speak with authority on what’s demanded of all of us, and who insists on telling the truth about the realities we face.

In hospitals, Tom Bossert told me, “the fire is going to burn brighter and hotter”: the operational tempo will accelerate; absenteeism and the need for isolation among health-care workers will increase as they themselves get sick; doctors and nurses may have to make decisions about triage that will exhaust and demoralize them. Strategic attention to the public-health system will be critical. Large things are required of everyone. F.D.R., in his first Inaugural Address, announced, “This is preëminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.” That’s still the right place to start.

David Remnick

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