As Donald Trump tries to convince voters to send him back to the White House, his allies are dusting off Ronald Reagan’s playbook. “People look around and they say, ‘Am I better off now than I was four years ago?’ The answer to that is no,” Lara Trump said on Sean Hannity’s show Tuesday night. “You can compare very easily how much better your life was with Donald Trump in office and how much worse you are now that Joe Biden is in office.”
It’s a catchy line, one Elise Stefanik also dusted off earlier this month. But does Trump really want Americans to remember this time four years ago, when he botched the federal response to the COVID pandemic and put lives at risk? Just scan the headlines from early March 2020. Politico wrote how “Trump’s mismanagement helped fuel coronavirus crisis.” The Washington Post found that Trump’s administration “frittered away” “precious weeks” while the virus was spreading. The New York Times reported that Trump dealt with the crisis “by repeating a string of falsehoods.”
Much of this happened in public view. Remember when Trump predicted COVID would just “disappear”? Remember when he showed up to the CDC headquarters wearing a campaign hat? Remember when he claimed that Google was building a website to help people find COVID tests, and Google didn’t know what he was talking about?
Actually, I didn’t. I had forgotten almost everything I’m about to recount in this story. I have a feeling many others have forgotten too. Maybe it’s a human tendency to block out past trauma, or perhaps it’s more that so much has happened since. In today’s supercharged news cycle, an event can feel dated four days later, never mind four years later. Plus, many people are “tuning out” of politics in 2024, clearly rejecting the rematch of a current and former president.
But campaign coverage should grapple with how an aspiring president would handle a global crisis. For that reason, it’s worth revisiting how the Republican contender mishandled one while president.
To the extent that anyone observes an “anniversary” of the pandemic, it is this week, the second week of March, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic; American corporations began a slow-motion shutdown; the NBA suspended its season; and the Trump administration (belatedly) declared a nationwide emergency. But the preceding weeks were critical.
In January and February 2020, Trump repeatedly claimed that the coronavirus was under control and downplayed the dangers. He effusively praised China’s handling of the outbreak and said, on January 30, that “we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us.”
He maintained a cheery attitude for several weeks. On February 25 he said, “They’re getting it more and more under control. So I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” Two days later, he was even blunter: “It’s going to disappear.”
Of course, the problem wasn’t disappearing. The virus was spreading around the world. By the end of February, coronavirus cases were rapidly rising in the US, but a dearth of testing kits meant the total couldn’t be measured. Trump was obsessed with keeping the reported number of official cases as low as possible—concentrating more on the reports than the real number of sick and scared Americans.
Trump administration aides like Larry Kudlow made similarly damaging comments. “We have contained this,” Kudlow claimed on February 25. That same day, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.”
It was as if Kudlow and McEnany were following the bosses’ orders. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told author Bob Woodward in a March 19 interview that was published later. Trump said he didn’t want to cause “panic.”
But if that’s true, why did he go so far in the opposite direction? The freshly impeached president (remember the abuse-of-power saga?) told rally-goers on February 28 that “the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” likened the Democrats’ conduct to “the impeachment hoax,” and said “this is their new hoax.”
Trump made so many dismissive comments that The Washington Post produced a video of “40 times Trump said the coronavirus would go away.”
We know, thanks to none other than Tucker Carlson, that trusted allies tried to warn Trump of the threat in early March. Carlson told Vanity Fair in a 2020 interview that he traveled to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, March 7 for an intervention of sorts. “I said exactly what I’ve said on TV, which is this could be really bad,” Carlson recalled. (I later learned that he was encouraged by an unnamed White House aide to talk some sense into Trump.) Carlson, it turned out, was exposed to COVID during the visit; while he didn’t fall ill, several others who were at the president’s compound that day did contract COVID.
The previous day was when Trump donned a “Keep America Great” hat at the CDC. While there, he second-guessed the medical professionals in the room, he randomly asked about Fox’s ratings, and he insulted the Democratic governor of Washington State. He claimed that “anybody who wants a test, can get a test,” which was patently false. “As a reporter, in general I’m not supposed to say something like this, but: The president’s statements to the press were terrifying,” Adam Rogers wrote for Wired. He said Trump’s presser was “full of Dear Leader-ish compliments, non-sequitorial defenses of unrelated matters, attacks on an American governor, and—most importantly—misinformation about the virus and the US response.”
The misinformation continued to flow the following week when Trump delivered an Oval Office address. If his intent was to calm the nation’s fears, he achieved the opposite: He announced a ban on travel from Europe, causing chaos at airports and hurried clarifications from cabinet officials. On Friday, March 13, he shook hands with guests at a COVID briefing, in direct contradiction to health officials’ guidance, prompting one attendee to dodge Trump’s hand and offer an elbow bump instead. Geraldo Rivera even tried to get through to Trump via the TV set, stating on Fox one night, “Mr. President, for the good of the nation, stop shaking hands.”
Criticism of Trump’s stupefying behavior and stream-of-consciousness briefings wasn’t limited to self-professed liberals like Geraldo. Philip Klein, then the executive editor of the right-leaning Washington Examiner, now the top editor of National Review Online, said at the time that Trump “has not shown an ability to break out of his typical antics, and treat the moment with the seriousness with which it deserves.”