The Privilege of Idiocy: How the Trump Administration Bungled the Coronavirus Response

As the global number of coronavirus cases tops 800,000, the head of the IMF has declared the world economy to be in a recession that could hit harder than it did in 2008. People are scared. Centers of power and wealth in North America and Europe are struggling to brace for the impact atop the exponential curve. The United States, a country whose president dismissed the press’s fear about the virus as “hysteria” and proclaimed it would “disappear” like a “miracle,” is now the world’s epicenter of the outbreak. The number of Americans filing for unemployment surged to a record 3.28 million last week as New York, accounting for roughly one-third of the deaths and one-half of the known cases in the nation, watches its hospitals rapidly overflow with patients, some of whom now have to share ventilators due to a shortage of basic equipment.

This is the richest country in the world.

COVID-19 has killed over 2500 people in the US so far, and the number will continue to rise. An analysis by the CDC in mid-March found that anywhere between 200,000 and 1.7 million people could die. A contemporaneous study by the Imperial College in London said the death toll could reach up to 2.2 million. A more recent estimate by the University of Washington School of Medicine put the toll between 38,000 and 162,000. All of these numbers, however, vary so wildly because they are contingent on one key factor: government response. And that raises the question: who is leading the government’s response in the United States?

The face that has captured news headlines, of course, is Donald Trump. The ex-reality TV show host can’t help but feed the media sharks with his novel incompetence and inflammatory outbursts, be it his cryptic tweet that “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” or his statement to Sean Hannity that “I have a feeling” New York doesn’t need as many ventilators as it says it does, or his lengthy spat with General Motors in which he called CEO Mary Barra a “mess.” To the extent that Trump acts as a surrogate for wealthy interests, he is evidently dangerous. But outside of that mostly titular function, he doesn’t do much. A three-month-long schedule leaked in 2019 revealed that Trump spends 60% of his waking hours in “executive time,” a euphemism for watching Fox and Friends and regurgitating Tucker Carlson’s talking points on Twitter.

Much of the Trump Administration’s harm goes largely unnoticed, perpetrated by figures lower down the bureaucratic hierarchy whose names don’t appear until the fourth or fifth paragraph of news articles, if at all. And when it comes to combatting the coronavirus, those are the people on the front lines of the federal government’s response. Political appointees like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Surgeon General Gerome Adams, and Medicaid/Medicare Chief Seema Verma are formally picked by Trump, but all three of them conspicuously have past ties to the Indiana state government under the administration of then governor, and now vice president, Mike Pence.

For holding such an important office, Pence has managed to elude the public eye for a remarkably long time. Since the inaugaration, he has emerged occasionally to deliver an awkward message to the Venezuelan people in Spanglish or to offer his own take on the Billy Graham rule. But he has otherwise exerted his influence from backstage, notably by interfering with appointments, “particularly in roles Trump didn’t really care about,” as one GOP operative put it. This wouldn’t be so out of the ordinary, except that Pence’s nominees apparently share his warped evangelical Christian worldview.

During his nomination process, HHS Secretary Alex Azar, whose predecessor was forced to resign after taking lavish private flights around the country using taxpayer money, advocated allowing employers to deny their female employees birth control coverage, in the name of “American values.” Azar, however, serves corporate as well as social conservative interests. Having been a top executive at Indiana-based drug company Eli Lilly when Pence was governor of the state, Azar did not surprise anyone when, in one of his first moves as HHS secretary, he approved a Medicaid work requirement for Indiana. Now, as a member of Pence’s Coronavirus Task Force, he has suggested that a vaccine will not be free for all Americans.

Valerie Huber, who was appointed senior policy advisor for the HHS assistant secretary, is an infamous abstinence-only education advocate. She is suspected to be responsible for the $200-million cut in funding to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program in 2017. She was eventually moved to the HHS Office of Global Affairs, which provides “leadership and expertise in global health diplomacy and policy.” At the time, an unnamed department official told Politico that Huber is “expected to strip references to sexual and reproductive health as well as sex education from the agency’s global health documents.” Pence’s fundamentalist fingerprints are all over many other agencies. His influence is so obvious that one HHS official called the vice-president’s cadre of appointees the “Indiana mafia.”

Pence himself is notorious for his religious convictions. Whatever his thoughts are now, he has expressed belief in the past that the Earth is cooling, not warming, that stem cell research is “obsolete,” and that evolution is just a “theory.” To top it all off, he threw in a bit of pro-tobacco propaganda, asserting that “smoking doesn’t kill.”

Born in 1959 to an Irish Catholic family in Columbus, Indiana, Pence was heavily influenced by the church in his early life. In college, he became a “born-again” evangelical Christian, and his conservative leanings deepened after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For most of the 1990s, he hosted his own radio talk show, which he described as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.” Using his newfound oratory skills, he propelled himself to the US Congress in 2001. He then went on to serve six terms, during which he opposed gay marriage, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and LGBT rights generally. As early as 2000, Pence declared he would only support the CARE Act, a law providing funding for HIV/AIDS treatment, if resources were cut off from “organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus” and instead redirected to “those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” His statements were widely understood as supporting gay conversion therapy.

Pence often summarizes his political philosophy with a neat aphorism: “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” In 2013, he took that philosophy back home to Indiana, where he would serve as state governor for the next four years. Two years after taking office, he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law allowing businesses to claim religious liberty as a legal defense against state and local governments. The legislation was worded so broadly, however, that many feared it would open the door for discrimination against LGBT people. Pence eventually buckled under pressure from individuals, corporations and advocacy groups that boycotted the state, and he revised the law to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Pence’s worst mistake as governor came in 2015. Early that year, HIV infections began proliferating across southern Indiana. By the time Pence took office two years prior, the region had already shown signs of prescription drug abuse, overdoses, and an outbreak of Hepatitis C. State law prohibited needle exchange programs, however, and when HIV began to spread, people found it almost impossible to know if they were infected because the only HIV testing facility in the area, a Planned Parenthood, had closed because of funding cuts supported by Pence. The Indiana State Department of Health opened an investigation into the burgeoning crisis, yet after two months, despite calls from health officials, the CDC and even members of his own party, he still refused to act. The pressure piled on.

Eventually, he committed to “go home and pray on it.” The next month, he finally established a temporary syringe exchange program, though it only lasted 30 days and soon afterward, he signed a bill upgrading the penalty for possession of a syringe from a misdemeanor to a felony. By 2017, 215 cases of HIV had been attributed to the outbreak. Experts estimate that up to 127 of those could have been prevented had Pence intervened when health officials exhorted him to. As a result, Austin, Indiana suffered a higher HIV incidence than any country in sub-Saharan Africa.

When Trump picked Mike Pence to lead the coronavirus task force in February, the vice president’s unseemly history resurfaced on social media, magazines and newspapers. It looked like Trump couldn’t have found a worse candidate to protect the nation against the ghastliest threat to public health in a century. And sure enough, Pence did not disappoint. The day after he was given his assignment, he travelled to the Conservative Political Action Convention to downplay the risks of the outbreak and assure a sea of bright-red MAGA hats that “we are ready for anything.” Larry Kudlow, director of the White House National Economic Council and task force member, backed up Pence by saying, “we’re in good shape. It just goes to show you what a country with freedom can do even with public health.” Acting White House Chief of Staff Nick Mulveney went so far as to toss it up as a media hoax. “They think this will bring down the president,” he told the crowd. “That’s what this is all about.”

At the same time that the administration trivialized the coronavirus, experts in the US and from the WHO were warning of the potential for a public health emergency. Since December, intelligence agencies had sent numerous reports to the White House urging Trump to take action before the situation spiraled out of control. He didn’t listen. “We have it totally under control,” Trump said after the first case of COVID-19 was identified in the US. “It’s going to be just fine.” Now, as the number of confirmed infections in the country reaches 156,000 and the administration scrambles to get the necessary equipment to the states, it has been revealed that the White House ignored an NSC playbook designed to help the government combat pandemics just like this one. All of the haphazard action we are witnessing should have begun two months ago, according to the document’s recommended timeline.

The administration’s immediate response isn’t the only failure, however. Trump and his officials have been gutting the nation’s public health infrastructure for three years, and we are now feeling the consequences. In 2018, the CDC dramatically downsized its epidemic prevention operations in 39 out of 49 countries, one of which was China, because it was starved for funding. The global health security initiative, which was cut by 80%, trained frontline workers in outbreak detection and strengthened laboratory and emergency response systems in countries where disease risks were greatest. Last July, the administration eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help prevent outbreaks in China. And perhaps most poignantly, Trump disbanded the US pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs.

In his typical Orwellian fashion, Trump rewrote the history we all just lived through, claiming that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and even blaming Obama for the slow response. I am not sure which is scarier: the unashamedly self-interested, non-ideological motives of the president, or the fundamentalist, Bible-thumping conviction of the vice president. Despite their disparate characters, Trump and Pence share a disdain for scientific authority, a tenuous relationship to the truth, and a tendency to favor gut feelings over facts. It doesn’t really matter if the pair’s religious zeal is sincere or not; they can maintain the support of their conservative Christian base by announcing a national day of prayer and suggesting that Easter will be “a beautiful time” to have “packed churches.” Meanwhile their policies, and lack thereof, kill off precisely the age group that so loyally rushes to the voting booths to reelect them.

As easy as it is to blame Trump for the mess we find ourselves in, we shouldn’t forget that he wouldn’t be in office if he wasn’t voted in by almost half the country. Ironically, these are the same people purchasing evangelical pastor Jim Bakker’s “Silver-Solution” coronavirus cure, or touching their television screens to be healed by televangelist Kenneth Copeland, or brushing their teeth with Alex Jones’ “Superblue Fluoride-Free Toothpaste” infused with “nanosilver,” which “kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range.” Far-right fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell Jr. are even invited onto Fox and Friends to speculate that North Korea conspired with China to cook up COVID-19 as a Christmas present for the United States. It’s not a coincidence that Liberty University, of which Falwell JR. is president, is one of the only campuses in the country to remain open.

Fortunately, in the United States, idiocy is a privilege. We are rich enough to blindly stumble through this crisis and still come out relatively okay. Poorer countries don’t have that luxury. The coronavirus is just beginning to spread across the global south, and when their infection rate spikes, it won’t be pretty. Mali has one ventilator for every million people. Kenya, a country of over 50 million, has only 550 ICU beds. Brazil’s health minister said, “Clearly, by the end of April, our health system will collapse.” The per capita health expenditure in Latin America and the Caribbean is little more than a quarter of that in Italy and OECD countries generally. And with war ravaging the Middle East, humanitarian catastrophe continuing in Venezuela, and diseases like Malaria, tuberculosis and HIV already crippling sub-Saharan Africa, the added pandemic and economic lockdown will be devastating. Governments in those regions can’t pass $2 trillion relief bills. Be glad that we can.