Pandemic as Campaign Stage: On Trump’s Handling of Covid-19 in the United States

By Zachary Levenson, December 2020 From the very beginning, US President Donald Trump was nonchalant about the coronavirus’ impact on Americans. A week before the first major spike in that country, he told reporters , ‘It goes away. It’s going away. We want it to go away with very, very few deaths.’ He made similar pronouncements as deaths peaked in mid-April at over 2700 per day, suggesting, ‘It’s also possible it doesn’t come back at all.’ But come back it did. By December, deaths per day were at an all-time high, as were new cases, and the US’s 19.4 million cases accounted for nearly a quarter of the global total – twice the number of cases as in the second most affected country, India, which of course has 4 times the population of the US. Even before the virus hit, the Trump administration took a classically American laissez-faire approach, disbanding the White House pandemic response team in May 2018 and as if prophets in reverse, eliminating the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency. After running a simulation of a pandemic scenario in 2019, the administration rejected its findings – namely, that the US lacked adequate ICU beds, ventilators, and personal protective equipment, and more broadly, that the country’s public health infrastructure was underfunded. Instead, Trump took the opposite tack, which culminated in his summer pronouncement that the US would withdraw (and withhold funding) from the World Health Organization. The administration’s strategy was, in retrospect, the world’s most deadly instance of the so-called herd immunity approach, only partially mitigated by states and municipalities implementing various public health measures, including mandatory mask orders, restaurant and bar shutdowns, and moving schools and universities to online-only or hybrid instruction. In other words, most public health measures, implemented at the state level, served to moderate the effects of Trump’s hands-off app