Upon President Trump’s arrival at the White House on Monday evening from Walter Reed hospital, where he was being treated for COVID-19, he lingered on the balcony of the South Portico, taking off his mask in a theatrical gesture, as if those watching were supposed to be surprised by the identity or the character of the man behind it. He struck various poses for the cameras before walking into the White House, where people who may or may not yet be infected with the coronavirus were waiting; public-health officials responded with shock to that act of total disregard. Once inside, the President filmed a short video, which he tweeted out later that evening, with the Washington monument and the D.C. night sky behind him, spelling out the recklessness and the cruelty of his approach to the pandemic.
“I learned so much about coronavirus,” Trump said, and then proceeded to demonstrate that he had learned nothing—that he had possibly unlearned anything he might have picked up during eight months of briefings on the pandemic. “One thing that’s for certain: don’t let it dominate you! Don’t be afraid of it! You’re gonna beat it!” Two hundred and ten thousand Americans, at least, have died of COVID-19, including an average of seven hundred a day in the past week; they did not die of fear or of a lack of will. Many of them were low-income elderly people, who had worked all their lives facing struggles that Trump could not imagine, and fought heroically in their last hours to breathe. They didn’t give up; it is Trump who has given up on keeping Americans like them alive.
“We have the best medical equipment; we have the best medicines, all developed recently!” Trump said. His tone suggested that an 800 number or Web address was about to flash on the screen, with offers to place an order now. Trump allowed that, when he arrived at the hospital, “I didn’t feel so good.” (That was on Friday, when he required supplemental oxygen and, as his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told reporters, his vital signs were worrying.) And yet, he claimed, he could have left “two days ago.” (That would have been Saturday, a day on which his oxygen level again fell; although the timeline given by his doctors is unclear, at some point he may have received supplemental oxygen a second time.) “I felt great, like, better than I have in a long time. I said just recently”—in a tweet that afternoon—“better than twenty years ago.” He then said, once again, “Don’t let it dominate! Don’t let it take over your lives.”
By “we,” Trump only—always—means “I.” At Walter Reed, he has been abundantly supplied with treatments meant for seriously ill patients, including an experimental antibody cocktail for which he received a “compassionate use” exception. No one really knows how those treatments might interact; no one in the public, for that matter, knows how long Trump has been positive for the coronavirus. Those speaking for him—from his White House doctor, Sean Conley, an osteopath, to Kayleigh McEnany, his press secretary, who tested positive for the coronavirus along with two of her deputies—have refused to say. (In the hours before Trump strode into the White House with his mask off, despite his active case of COVID-19, staff members who had been in contact with colleagues who tested positive had been quickly exiting the White House, scrambling to isolate and switch to remote work.) In the White House, Trump will also have access to a high level of medical care twenty-four hours a day. He may need it; COVID-19 patients often take a sharp turn for the worse in the second week of their illness. And yet he talked as though he had walked the path of the common folk.
Or maybe he wants to be seen as a folk hero. “We’re going back. We’re going back to work—we’re gonna be out front. As your leader, I had to do that.” Had to do what? Flout basic epidemiological guidelines? The White House, in defending its practices in the past few days, has been a disastrous source of misinformation. Official after official has claimed, for example, that the mostly maskless indoor and outdoor events around the announcement of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination for the Supreme Court were no cause for alarm, because participants were given a rapid coronavirus test on arrival. (Two senators who attended that event have tested positive, along with Kellyanne Conway, Chris Christie, the president of Notre Dame, and others.) But those tests are known to yield a quite high number of false negatives; they are meant only to be one of many tools, not an all-clear pass. And even the best tests can miss positives early in the illness—which can also be when an infected person is most likely to spread the virus. All that raises the question of whether people in the Administration were willfully ignoring the most basic information about the disease and its course. Didn’t any of them read the specifications about the rapid tests? Did no one even have an instinct for self-preservation? The number of lies that Administration officials would have had to tell—to themselves, to their colleagues, and to the public—to turn the White House into a pandemic hot spot is stunning.
Indeed, even to focus on the advanced medical assets that Trump has access to misses a more basic point. He is encouraging Americans to do without something that everyone easily can have: a mask. The sight of someone in a mask is a reminder that we are in this together and that each person has a role in stopping the pandemic. A mask is the most effective tool for fighting the pandemic that we have right now. It is also an emblem of basic, mutual respect and decency, and that may be what offends Trump the most. He is ready to let people die so that the visuals of American communities don’t include reminders—as long, that is, as no one looks inside the hospitals—that the pandemic even exists. On some level, he seems jealous of the attention paid to the virus; his vision is the one that is supposed to dominate. “Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did,” Trump said. He doesn’t understand what a leader is; it is not being the person out front in a march of folly.
On Monday, he tweeted that he would be “back on the Campaign Trail soon!!!”—with, once again, no regard for the supporting staff that he might expose to the virus, including Secret Service agents and people who clean up after him. The irony, of course, is that if Trump had urged his supporters to take a disciplined approach to wearing masks and social distancing months ago, the pandemic might be under better control, the country might be closer to opening up, and his own electoral prospects would likely be stronger. It has become a truism that Trump cares only about himself, but the reality is even worse: he cares only about a fantasy version of himself.
There are better treatments available than there were in the early days. McEnany, in an interview on Monday, said that “President Trump developed them,” though, of course, that’s not true. Some were figured out by exhausted doctors in New York during the worst days of the pandemic in the spring, when they realized that ventilators were not best for all patients and that measures like turning people over onto their stomachs might help relieve pressure on their lungs. Scientists around the world are working on treatments and vaccines, though even in the best of scenarios a vaccine will not, as Trump claimed in his video, be available “momentarily”; even one approved tomorrow will take months to manufacture and distribute broadly to the general public. But there should be no mistake: we have not cracked the problem of COVID-19. People of all ages still die of it. And, with forty thousand new cases a day and cold weather in much of the country pushing people indoors, there is every indication that the winter ahead will be bleak and deadly. Time is running out to avert the next wave of this mass tragedy.
“I know there’s a risk; there’s a danger, but that’s O.K.!” Trump said. “And now I’m better, and maybe I’m immune—I don’t know.” Nobody knows, but the comment raised the still more alarming possibility that the Trump Administration will become even more enraptured with never-mind-the-virus strategies, such as actively pursuing natural “herd immunity”—the idea that, if enough people are already sick, the virus will run out of targets. That could cost hundreds of thousands of lives that masks alone could save. And the President himself is, again, still early in the course of his illness. The coronavirus may not be done with Trump. It is certain that it is not done with America.
