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WASHINGTON — Presi-
dent Trump’s inattention to
detail, distaste for experts,
need for validation and
belief that he can create his
own set of alternative facts
have been hallmarks of his
political rise.
But after three years in
which daily headlines about
chaos in Washington often
have contrasted with a
robust market on Wall
Street and tranquility in
much of the country, the
president’s unorthodox
approach to his job has
suddenly been cast in a
harsher light by a spiraling
and potentially catastroph-
ic global public health crisis.
Determined to convince
the public and the markets
that his administration has
the threat posed by the new
strain of coronavirus under
control, Trump’s public
statements have more often
added to the panic than
calmed it.
“Lack of information, not
being forthright, sugar-
coating information — ‘We
don’t want people to panic!’
— leads to credibility prob-
lems,” said Craig Fugate,
who served as a top emer-
gency manager for Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush and then as
the administrator of the
Federal Emergency Man-
agement Agency under
President Obama. Telling
the public what you don’t
know and what level of
confidence you have in the
information you have, he
continued, is also crucial.
“I tell people in public
service: This is your mo-
ment of truth.”
Trump, however, is im-
posing his own version of
truth on the situation. Even
as advisors have sought to
convince him of the serious-
ness of the public health
threat, he has continued to
minimize the impact, re-
peatedly saying that only
the elderly are at real risk.
“Stay calm; it’ll go away,”
he said after a visit to Capi-
tol Hill this week.
But Trump is learning
that the virus won’t be
contained by wishing it
away. Over the weekend, he
played golf at Mar-a-Lago
and dined with Brazil’s
President Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro’s spokes-
person, who after the dinner
posted a photo of himself
standing next to Trump,
tested positive Thursday for
the virus. That news, howev-
er, has yet to compel the
president to be tested for
the virus himself, according
to White House Press Secre-
tary Stephanie Grisham.
She said he had displayed
no symptoms of illness.
It was not until Thursday
that Trump agreed to quit
shaking hands and start
canceling campaign rallies,following cancellations by
major sports leagues and
corporate conventions as
well as his Democratic
rivals.
One of the areas on
which Trump has most
conspicuously made state-
ments that don’t square
with reality involves testing
for the virus.
“We’ve done a good job
on testing,” he insisted
Thursday.
Almost simultaneously,
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the
director of the National
Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, told
lawmakers on Capitol Hill
that the dearth of available
tests in the U.S. as the out-
break spreads amounts to
“a failing.”
“The system is not really
geared to what we need
right now,” Fauci said in tes-
timony to the House Over-
sight Committee. “That is a
failing.... Let’s admit it.”
“The idea of anybody
getting [tested] easily, the
way people in other coun-
tries are doing it — we’re not
set up for that,” he said. “Do
I think we should be? Yes.”
The lack of easily acces-
sible tests has become a
major line of attack from
Democrats and has gener-
ated rising bipartisan frus-
tration. It has increasingly
become a devastating sym-
bol of the administration’s
overall response to the
COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have a lot of work to
do,” Sen. Richard M. Burr
(R-N.C.) said Thursday.
Asked whether he was
confident the work would
get done to ensure co-
ronavirus tests are more
readily available to meet the
soaring demand, the sen-
ator paused for nearly 10
seconds before answering,
“It would be better if we
could rewind about six
weeks, but we don’t have
that luxury.”
Inattention to detail has
also hurt. Wednesday eve-
ning, as he read prepared
remarks from a TelePromp-
Ter during an Oval Office
address, Trump made
several factual errors, in-
cluding a declaration thatthe new ban on travel from
Europe would apply to
trade, which he corrected in
a tweet minutes after the
speech.
His failure to make clear
what was covered by his ban
on travel from Europe to the
U.S. helped generate a crush
of travelers at European
airports as some American
citizens rushed to flights
under the mistaken impres-
sion that they might not be
able to return home.
Trump avoided any
mention of the meager
testing in the U.S. and as-
sured the country that the
decline in financial markets
wasn’t a crisis but “just a
temporary moment in
time.”
That immediately
sparked another massive
sell-off.
Earlier in the crisis,
Trump stated that a vaccine
would soon be available,
forcing his own health ex-
perts to explain that it
would not be available for
roughly 18 months. He also
tipped his hand on the
degree to which public
perception drives his deci-
sions, saying that he didn’t
want to allow a cruise ship
with many infected passen-
gers to dock because that
would drive up the number
of reported coronavirus
cases in the U.S.
On Monday, while re-
turning to Washington from
Florida, Trump made a
point of shaking hands with
supporters gathered on the
airport tarmac, despite
warnings to avoid close
contact with others who
could spread the virus.
Before reporters and cam-
eras in the Oval Office on
Thursday, Trump joked
that he was uncertain about
shaking hands with the
visiting Irish taoiseach, Leo
Varadkar.
But the president con-
tinued to put a positive
gloss on an increasingly dire
situation, stating that the
sudden drop in gasoline
prices resulting from
sharply lower crude oil
prices and a growing reluc-
tance to travel is “like a tax
cut.”The persistent noncha-
lance from the president of
the United States, increas-
ingly off-key amid growing
national concern, has com-
plicated efforts by public
health officials to deliver
more essential information.
That effort gets even harder
because of the unofficial
requirement for anyone
serving in the adminis-
tration not to contradict
Trump publicly.
During an off-camera
briefing with reporters this
weekend, Secretary of
Health and Human Serv-
ices Alex Azar was asked
about Trump’s false state-
ment that anyone who
needs a test for the virus can
have one.
Rather than simply
correct the error and move
on, Azar, whose standing in
the White House is fragile,
tried to square Trump’s
bluster with reality.
“It’s just different ways of
phrasing it,” he said. “He’s
using a shorthand. What he
meant to say is, ‘We’re not in
the way of that.’ ”
Inside the West Wing,
several officials are “nerv-
ous that some of the things
being said on television are
less than duly vetted,” said a
person close to the White
House who did not want to
be identified to avoid burn-
ing bridges.
“Everyone is answering
to an audience of one,” the
person added.
Vice President Mike
Pence, tapped by Trump to
lead the response to the
coronavirus crisis, has
prefaced almost all of his
public comments with
praise for the president.
During one appearance, he
even backed Trump’s deci-
sion to shake hands as
appropriate “for someone in
our line of work.”
As Fugate says, “You’ve
got public officials put in an
awkward position where
they’re either having to
testify or put out state-
ments that are correcting
the president, and now it’s
looking like they’re disa-
greeing with the president.”
Many of the adminis-
tration’s health officials and
political appointees share a
sense that Trump and some
of his closest aides have
been slow to appreciate the
seriousness of the threat,
multiple White House
staffers said. But there are
some signals that may
finally be changing, even
though the window for
containing the spread of the
pandemic has likely passed.
“They’ll never admit to
any sort of wrongdoing, but
I think they’re pivoting to,
‘Here’s the real story and
this is what we know,’” said
the person close to the
White House.Times staff writer Jennifer
Haberkorn contributed to
this report.BACK STORY
His own version of truth
Trump’s response to the coronavirus may be making things worse
By Eli Stokols
and Noah BiermanPRESIDENT TRUMPhas minimized the COVID-
pandemic even as advisors have sought to convince
him that it is a serious threat to public health.Evan VucciAssociated PressGreek Olympian Anna Korakaki receives the Olympic flame during the lighting ceremony Thursday in
Olympia, in preparation for the Tokyo 2020 Games. Tokyo organizers are downsizing the arrival ceremony
for the Olympic torch because of the coronavirus pandemic. Organizing committee President Yoshiro
Mori said that 140 children will not be sent to Greece to give the flame a send-off on March 19, a day before
it is due to arrive in Japan. The four-month torch relay around Japan will begin on March 26.1,000 WORDS:OLYMPIA, Greece
Aris MessinisAFP/Getty ImagesTORCHBEARER