14 new york | march 2–15, 2020
Trump announced that Vice-President Mike Pence
would lead the response, a claim that was quickly con-
tradicted by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex
Azar, who told reporters he still chaired the task force.
The president shared with his reporters his shock at his
recent discovery that influenza is deadly. “The flu in our
country kills from 29,000 people to 69,000 people a
year,” he said. “That was shocking to me.”
When a reporter asked why his proposed 2021 budget
would massively cut back medical research and public-
health funding, Trump, rather than obfuscate, oddly
leaned in to the premise and boasted about his frugality.
“Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for
many, many years, and if we ever need them, we can get
them very quickly. And rather than spending the money—
I’m a businessperson, I don’t like having thousands of
people around when you don’t need ’em, when we need
’em, we can get them back very quickly.” Why pay medical
experts to conduct research and maintain a public-health
infrastructure year after year when you can just hire them
up after the epidemic hits? As Homer Simpson once com-
plained, “We’re always buying Maggie vaccinations for
diseases she doesn’t even have.”
The most striking thing about Trump’s response has
been his insistence on viewing the episode through the
prism of the stock market. To the extent the stock mar-
ket matters, it is as an indication of a broader risk to the
economy. The market’s plunge matters because it sug-
gests the possibility of an economic contraction. If the
economy does not suffer from the virus, the market will
recover its loss. If the economy goes into recession, the
recession, not the advance signal of it sent via the stock
market, will be the problem. Yet Trump has acted both
publicly and privately as though sustaining the stock
market is his ultimate goal. Trump has “become furious
about the stock market’s slide” and told aides not to say
anything that might cause a drop, the Post reported. At
his news conference, he preposterously insisted the
market had dropped in response to the Democratic-
primary debate, rather than the global crisis.
Trump has long viewed the stock market as a measure
of his success. It matters intensively to his rich friends.
Perhaps more importantly, the market’s daily perfor-
mance is often splayed across the television screens he
stares at for hours on end, substituting for the numerical
affirmation polling has never provided him. Trump does
not play the long game or the medium game. He is likely
incapable of focusing on any broader goal than making
the red downward arrows on his television go away.
“Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it
very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule
too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be
imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much
structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see
what develops,” he wrote in his first autobiography. “I plan
for the future by focusing exclusively on the present.”
Trump has consistently resolved any trade-off between
long-term and short-term objectives in favor of the latter.
Balloon the deficit to wring a little more juice out of an
already healthy economy? Sure. Pump more pollution into
the air and water in order to goose the energy sector? Why
not? The costs will be borne by somebody else. But it is
possible that, for once, the price he has exacted on the
country will be due before he has fled the scene. ■security and biodefense—have left or were fired since
- The global health community has been raising
alarms for two years about the administration’s lack of pre-
paredness. “These moves make us materially less safe. It’s
inexplicable,” complained the Center for Global Develop-
ment’s Jeremy Konyndyk when Ziemer departed and his
staff was dissolved. An administration official explained
the rationale to the Washington Post at the time, “In a
world of limited resources, you have to pick and choose.”
And since there was no terrifying global pandemic at that
moment, preparing for one didn’t seem like a priority.
Bleeding the department charged with protecting our
health seems bafflingly risky. From Trump’s perspective,
though, it looks like a shrewd streamlining process.
Throughout his first term, the president has grown
increasingly obsessed with internal subversion. He has
reportedly been working through lists of officials his loy-
alists suspect of harboring impure thoughts about the
president. The coronavirus has hit at the moment when
Trump is intensifying an ongoing purge of the entire
federal bureaucracy of any official suspected of disloy-
alty. “The federal government is massive, with millions
of people—and there are a lot of folks out there taking
action against this president, and if we find them, we will
take appropriate action,” warned White House spokes-
man Hogan Gidley just last week.
It is fair to assume that the supply of employees pos-
sessing both high levels of technical expertise and
hearts purely devoted to Donald Trump is finite. Even
as the crisis has appeared, though, the president has
evinced far deeper concern with his staff ’s loyalty than
its competence.
Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host recently
honored by Trump with a Medal of Freedom, has argued
the coronavirus is a phantasmal threat being inflated by
Democrats in order to spook the markets and thereby
hurt Trump. Limbaugh insinuated that Dr. Nancy Mes-
sonnier, a top official at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, was directing the plot. “Somebody,
quick, find out who she donates to politically,” he told
listeners. “M-e-s-s-o-n-n-i-e-r, Dr. Nancy, CDC. I want
to find out who she donates to.” To be clear: Messonnier’s
offense was disseminating accurate information about
the virus’s spread. Trump appears to have absorbed this
bizarre conspiracy theory. “The president’s anger about
the CDC briefing yesterday,” reported CNBC’s Eamon
Javers, “is focused on Dr. Nancy Messonnier.”
In an attempt to counteract the harmful effect of
truthful information from his remaining experts, Trump
took control of the message. “Low Ratings Fake News
MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything pos-
sible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible,
including panicking markets, if possible,” he tweeted,
attempting to assure the public of his mastery of the
virus, even if he had not yet learned how to spell it cor-
rectly. Finding himself in the role of national comforter
seemed to discomfit the president. Pandemic response
calls for competence and establishing trust, both quali-
ties of which he is bereft. Trump performs best when he
can locate a foil to bul the virus—unlike a trade
partner or opposing p —offered no such target.
Unless he planned to unveil a mean nickname forcovid-
19, none of the tools in his bag seemed to work.
At a news conference attempting to stem the panic,
intelligencer
Don’t Expect
a Citywide
QuarantineCordoning off the
five boroughs
with the NYPD and
National
Guardsmen is
logistically
inconceivable and,
more importantly,
ineffective.
Even a voluntary
quarantine is
unlikely because
there is no reason
to believe New
Yorkers would coop
erate. Either
people will flee in
anticipation or
they will “von Trapp
it out of the city,”
says Kelly Hills,
a bioethicist who
studies quarantines.
During the 2003
SARS outbreak,
Toronto attempted
to quarantine
23,000 people—
but only 57 percent
complied. More
recently, the
mayor of Wuhan
estimated that
almost half of
the city’s population
left before
the quarantine
was enacted.
—james d.
walsh