THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 11
COMMENT
THEPOLITICSOFTHEVIRUS
W
hen has New York known a
grimmer week? The sirens are
unceasing. Funeral parlors are over-
whelmed. Refrigerator trailers are now
in service as morgues, and can be found
parked outside hospitals all over town.
We’re told that there are “glimmers of
hope,” that hospital admissions are
slowing, that the curve is flattening. Yet
the misery is far from over. “The bad
news isn’t just bad,” New York’s gover-
nor, Andrew Cuomo, said at one of his
briefings last week. “The bad news is
actually terrible.”
Across the country, the coronavirus
continues to ravage the confined and
the vulnerable, from inmates of the Cook
County jail, in Chicago, to workers at
the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Ca-
milla, Georgia. Data from a variety
of reliable sources show that African-
Americans, who suffer disproportion-
ately from poverty, inadequate housing,
limited access to good health care, and
chronic illnesses such as diabetes and
hypertension, are dying from COVID-
at horrific rates.
The pandemic is an event in the
natural history of our species, but it is
also a political episode. Its trajectory is
shaped by policy measures specific to
particular governments. The fact that
the United States is experiencing tre-
mendous losses—that it has far more
COVID-19 cases than any other coun-
try in the world—relates to a number
of collective risk factors and preëxist-
ing conditions. The most notable one
is to be found in the Oval Office.
“This is not the apocalypse,” Presi-
dent Barack Obama assured his shell-
shocked staff members the morning after
Donald Trump’s election. When, the
next day, Obama received Trump at the
White House and tried to relay infor-
mation about a range of issues—the
threat from North Korea, the Iran nu-
clear deal, immigration, health care—he
got nowhere. Trump wanted to talk about
himself and the size of his campaign ral-
lies. Obama spoke about the value of
having at his side such people as his
homeland-security adviser, Lisa Mo-
naco, citing her insistence on bringing
him unvarnished, unwelcome news about
everything from terrorism to the Ebola
crisis. In the White House, she was
known as Dr. Doom. Trump replied that
maybe he should hire a Dr. Doom; he
was joking. From the beginning, he prac-
ticed social distancing from anyone who
told him what he didn’t want to hear.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
And here we are, playing a tragic game
of catch-up against a virus that has killed
thousands and left millions unemployed.
At Trump’s State of the Union address
on February 4th, he pledged, “My Ad-
ministration will take all necessary steps
to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”
Three weeks later, Kayleigh McEnany,
a loud promoter of birtherism and of
Trump talking points during the 2016
campaign, cheerfully told the Fox Busi-
ness audience, “We will not see diseases
like the coronavirus come here, we will
not see terrorism come here, and isn’t
that refreshing when contrasting it with
the awful Presidency of President
Obama?” Now McEnany is the Presi-
dent’s press secretary.
The coronavirus has inflicted a level
of pain that is deep and global. And yet
many nations, from South Korea to
Germany, have done far better at re-
sponding to it than the United States
has. The reasons for the American fail-
ing include a lack of preparation, de-
layed mobilization, insufficient testing,
and a reluctance to halt travel. The Ad-
ministration, from its start, has waged
war on science and expertise and on
what Trump’s former adviser Steve Ban-
non called “the administrative state.”
The results are all around us. Trump
has made sure that a great nation is
peculiarly vulnerable to a foreseeable
public-health calamity.
If the death rate turns out to be less
than the initial forecasts––and, please,
let it be so––it will be thanks to the dis-
cipline of the public and the heroics of
first responders, not the foresight or the
leadership of the President. The knowl-
edge that we are led so ineptly and with
