President Donald Trump’s latest messages on the pandemic are almost indistinguishable from the one he was sending at the very beginning: Everything is under control.
“We’ve made every decision correctly,” Trump said in a rambling Rose Garden address. With hardly a mention of the virus and its ongoing devastation, he claimed, “We may have some embers or some ashes or we may have some flames coming, but we’ll put them out. We’ll stomp them out.” Days later, his reelection campaign announced the return of Trump’s massive rallies “This month,” declared a video tweeted out by his campaign’s spokeswoman, “we’re back.” The words loomed between footage of thousands of Trump supporters packed tightly into massive stadiums. There’s no mystery behind Trump’s eagerness to pretend the pandemic is all but over. His government’s response to the coronavirus, the ballooning economic crisis, and the waves of protests against police violence have sent Trump’s overall approval rating plummeting in every single group of likely voters.
A return to normal is grievously out of step with a pandemic that continues to infect roughly 20,000 new people in the United States every day and kill up to 1,000.
But it is line with the White House’s general retreat from attempts to control the outbreak. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, revealed that he had not met or spoken with Trump in two weeks. The federal official in charge of overseeing testing announced he will leave that position shortly, despite the fact that public health experts say the country is not conducting enough tests to safely reopen. The White House coronavirus task force, where Fauci and others are supposed to coordinate the country’s response to the deadly pandemic, convened only sporadically through the end of May and now meets just twice a week. Jared Kushner, a member of the task force, has privately assured people that the spread of the virus was under control. The White House is holding up its efforts to accelerate the development of vaccines — most of which are still months away from entering large human trials — as evidence that it is doing all it can to battle the virus. “This doesn’t need to be the public ‘coronavirus show’ every day anymore,” an unnamed official told Politico. The federal government has largely washed its hand of efforts to bring states in line, leaving the task of national coordination up to governors. Fauci also contradicted Trump’s claim that “we understand this disease now.” In fact, Fauci said, “we’re still at the beginning of really understanding.” Making matters more dangerous, many states seeing a record surge of new cases, such as Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina. Those spikes are broadly linked to Memorial Day weekend, when cellphone data suggests that thousands of residents let their guard down to shop and travel. Health experts worry that another spike will follow the mass civil protests against police violence taking place in hundreds of cities in all 50 states. For Trump, the protests aren’t a health concern or a moral challenge but a way to dodge questions. Aides to his campaign told Politico that with so many people protesting, they believed it would make it difficult for critics to call Trump out. Asked about safeguarding voters who cast ballots in person, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany snapped back, “There’s a way to safely vote if you can safely protest.”