William Saletan has written a devastating summary of Donald Trump's interference or negligence in every stage of the US government's failure regarding SARS-CoV-2: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.
The dozens of links offer clear evidence of how Trump collaborated with China to conceal and then cover-up the threat from SARS-CoV-2, how he suppressed numerous warnings, lied hundreds of times to the public about all aspects of the crisis, impeded every aspect of the government's response, dismissed and minimized the states' requests for life-saving medical supplies, ridiculed the idea of wearing masks and distancing, refused to increase testing, tried to silence anyone who attempted to tell the truth, bullied numerous states to take deadly risks by opening businesses and factories despite surging infections, ordered government agencies to weaken their safety guidelines.
Saletan proves beyond all doubt that when this crisis finally passes, Donald Trump should be held personally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of Americans.
I've posted about 2,000 of the article's 5,700 words. Please read the entire article.
The Trump Pandemic: A Blow-By-Blow Account Of How The President Killed Thousands Of Americans
William Saletan, Slate, August 9, 2020
On July 17, President Donald Trump sat for a Fox News interview at the White House. At the time, nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus. ... [Trump] scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along. "Everybody thought this summer it would go away," said Trump. "They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? So they got that one wrong."
Trump's account was completely backward. Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus. In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption. The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump. And he hadn't gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers. He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February. ...
This isn't speculation. All the evidence is in the public record. But the truth, unlike Trump's false narrative, is scattered in different places. It's in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president's stray remarks. This article puts those fragments together. It documents Trump's interference or negligence in every stage of the government's failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.
Trump has always been malignant and incompetent. ... But in the pandemic, his vices—venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness—turned deadly. They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage. The coronavirus debacle isn't, as Trump protests, an "artificial problem" that spoiled his presidency. It's the fulfillment of everything he is. ...
In late January, Trump's medical advisers agreed with his national security team that he should suspend travel from China to the United States. But Trump resisted. He had spent months cultivating a relationship with Xi and securing the trade deal. He was counting on China to buy American goods and boost the U.S. economy, thereby helping him win reelection. ... Trump also worried that a travel ban would scare the stock market. But by the end of the month, airlines were halting flights to China anyway. On Jan. 31, Trump gave in.
His advisers knew the ban would only buy time. They wanted to use that time to fortify America. But Trump had no such plans. ... Thanks to loopholes in the ban, the coronavirus strain that would engulf Washington state arrived from China about two weeks later. But at the time of the interview, the ban hadn't even taken effect. The important thing, to Trump, was that he had announced the ban. He was less interested in solving the problem than in looking as though he had solved it. ...
Trump dismissed the outcry for masks and ridiculed Democrats for "forcing money" on him to buy supplies. "They say, 'Oh, he should do more,' " the president scoffed in an interview on Feb. 28. "There's nothing more you can do." ...
Fauci saw this [the lack of testing] as a grave vulnerability. From Feb. 14 to March 11, he warned in a dozen hearings, forums, and interviews that the virus might be spreading "under the radar." But Trump wasn't interested. He liked having a low infection count—he bragged about it at rallies—and he understood that the official count would stay low if people weren't tested. ... He complained that additional tests, by exposing additional cases, made him "look bad." ...
When the spread of the virus in the United States could no longer be denied, Trump called it the "invisible enemy." But Trump had kept it invisible. The CDC would later acknowledge that due to woefully insufficient testing, the overwhelming majority of infections had gone undiagnosed. ...
Trump didn't just ignore warnings. He suppressed them. When Azar briefed him about the virus in January, Trump called him an "alarmist" and told him to stop panicking. When Navarro submitted a memo about the oncoming pandemic, Trump said he shouldn't have put his words in writing. As the stock market rose in February, Trump discouraged aides from saying anything about the virus that might scare investors. ...
On Feb. 10, just before a rally in New Hampshire, Trump told Fox News host Trish Regan that the Chinese "have everything under control." ... Trump walked onstage ... "By April," he explained, "in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away."
Trump didn't tell the crowd that he had heard this theory from Xi. But that's what the record indicates. There's no evidence of Trump peddling the warm-weather theory prior to Feb. 7, when he had an overnight phone call with Xi. Immediately after that call, Trump began to promote the idea. Later, he mentioned that Xi had said it. ... The American president, against the judgment of his public health officials, was feeding American citizens a false assurance passed to him by the Chinese president.
Three days after the rally in New Hampshire, Trump defended China's censorship of information about the virus. ... "I think they want to put the best face on it," he said. ... Weeks later, Trump would also excuse Chinese disinformation about the virus, telling Fox New viewers that "every country does it." ...
On Feb. 25, when Messonnier said Americans should prepare for school and workplace closures, the stock market plunged. Trump, in a rage, called Azar and threatened to fire Messonnier. The next day, the president seized control of the administration's press briefings on the virus. ...
Trump's eruption brought his subordinates into line. Shortly after the president's angry call to Azar, Redfield told Congress that "our containment strategy has been quite successful." At her next briefing, for the first time, Messonnier praised Trump by name. She parroted his talking points ...
In the three weeks after his Feb. 26 crackdown on his subordinates, Trump opposed or obstructed every response to the crisis. ... Fauci was desperate to accelerate the production and distribution of tests, but Trump said it wasn't necessary. ...
Trump also refused to invoke the Defense Production Act, which could have accelerated the manufacture of masks, gloves, ventilators, and other emergency equipment. ...
The president needed to tell Americans that the crisis was urgent and that life had to change. Instead, he told them everything was fine. ... On March 6, visiting the CDC, he was asked about the risks of packing people together at rallies. "It doesn't bother me at all," he said.
As schools and businesses began to close, Trump pushed back. ... On March 9, he tweeted that the virus had hardly killed anyone ...
The CDC would later calculate that in the three weeks from "late February to early March, the number of U.S. COVID-19 cases increased more than 1,000-fold." ... By May 3, the price of that delay was more than 50,000 lives.
On March 23, a week after he announced the mitigation guidelines, Trump began pushing to rescind them. "We have to open our country," he demanded. ...
Trump pushed states to reopen businesses even where, under criteria laid out by his health officials, it wasn't safe to do so. ... He issued an executive order to keep meat-processing plants open, despite thousands of infections among plant employees. He ordered the CDC to publish rules allowing churches to reopen, and he vowed to "override any governor" who kept them closed. ... In July, he pressed the agency to loosen its guidelines for reopening schools.
He continued to suppress warnings. In April, he claimed that doctors who reported shortages of supplies were faking it. When an acting inspector general released a report that showed supplies were inadequate, Trump dismissed the report and replaced her. When a Navy captain wrote a letter seeking help for his infected crew, Trump endorsed the captain's demotion. ...
Having argued in March against testing, Trump now complained that doctors were testing too many people. ... When Fauci and Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said more tests were needed, Trump openly contradicted them. ...
Fauci, Birx, Redfield, and other health officials pointed out that mitigation was working. ... Trump publicly overruled them, tried to discredit them, and pressured them to disavow their words. To block Fauci from disputing Trump's assurances that the virus was "going away," the White House barred him from doing most TV interviews. ...
Trump interfered with every part of the government's response. He told governors that testing for the virus was their job, not his. When they asked for help in getting supplies, he told them to "get 'em yourself." ...
Trump didn't just get in the way. He made things worse. ... He suggested that the virus could be killed by injecting disinfectants. ...
The simplest way to control the virus was to wear face coverings. But instead of encouraging this precaution, Trump ridiculed masks. He said they could cause infections, and he applauded people who spurned them. ... An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that people who seldom or never wore masks were 12 times more likely to support Trump than to support his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Some scientific models imply that Trump's suppression of mask use may have contributed to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.
On June 10, Trump announced that he would resume holding political rallies. ... When reporters raised the possibility that he might spread the virus by drawing crowds indoors, he accused them of "trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies."
Despite being warned that infections in Oklahoma were surging, Trump proceed with a rally at a Tulsa arena on June 20. To encourage social distance, the arena's managers put "Do Not Sit Here" stickers on alternate seats. The Trump campaign removed the stickers. ... Two weeks later, Tulsa broke its record for daily infections, and the city's health director said the rally was partly to blame. Former presidential candidate Herman Cain attended the rally, tested positive for the virus days afterward, and died at the end of July.
At the rally, Trump ... said he had told "my people" to "slow the testing down, please." Aides insisted that the president was joking. But on June 22, in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said he was only half-joking. He affirmed, this time seriously, that he had told "my people" that testing was largely frivolous and bad for America's image. Weeks later, officials involved in negotiations on Capitol Hill disclosed that the administration ... was trying to block funding for virus tests. ...
Two days after the Tulsa rally, an interviewer asked Trump whether he was putting lives at risk "by continuing to hold these indoor events." Trump brushed off the question: "I'm not worried about it. No, not at all." The next day, June 23, the president staged another largely mask-free rally, this time in a church in Arizona, where a statewide outbreak was underway. ...
It's hard to believe a president could be this callous and corrupt. It's hard to believe one person could get so many things wrong or do so much damage. But that's what happened. Trump knew we weren't ready for a pandemic, but he didn't prepare. He knew China was hiding the extent of the crisis, but he joined in the cover-up. He knew the virus was spreading in the United States, but he said it was vanishing. He knew we wouldn't find it without more tests, but he said we didn't need them. He delayed mitigation. He derided masks. He tried to silence anyone who told the truth. And in the face of multiple warnings, he pushed the country back open, reigniting the spread of the disease.
Now Trump asks us to reelect him. ...
In Trump's story, the virus is a foreign intrusion, an unpleasant interlude, a stroke of bad luck. But when you stand back and look at the full extent of his role in the catastrophe, it's amazing how lucky we were. For three years, we survived the most ruthless, reckless, dishonest president in American history. Then our luck ran out.
