The True Cost of the Trump Presidency

Donald Trump isn’t just a risk to American Democracy

Image from Johns Hopkins, March 8th 2020

America has long had a strained relationship with science. From racial pseudoscience to more recent intelligent design and climate denialism, vast swaths of the U.S. population have always disregarded the opinions of experts. The United States now faces a grave crisis. We have elected a President who not only rejects science he disagrees with but actively promotes false information and disregards expert opinion in favor of his feelings. Under normal circumstances, these antics cause damage to the credibility of scientists and public belief in facts. However, during an emergency, they can cause catastrophic damage to the lives of millions.

For a time, it seemed like we might escape four years of Donald Trump (relatively) unscathed. While his presidency has done enormous damage to U.S. democratic institutions and global standing, we looked likely to escape a significant global crisis that would test his leadership. The past three years have seen the United States lurch from mishap to blunder under a president who proudly describes himself as a “ stable genius.” The list of Trump embarrassments is almost impossible to recite just due to the sheer number of them. From mocking a disabled reporter to admitting to illegal acts on live television, recent American political experience has been a strange blend of reality TV and The Sopranos. So far, however, it has not affected the lives or day to day routines of most U.S. citizens in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, the first genuinely global pandemic of the 21st century is about to bring the reality of a Trump presidency to the masses.

Donald Trump began undermining American public health and science from the very beginning.

On January 27, 2020, Trump signed his first executive order, which aimed to be the prelude to repealing the entirety of Obamacare. In 2018 multiple senior government health officials (including the one in charge of pandemic response) were fired from their posts. Many of whom had no replacement appointed. Even as recently as January of 2020, Trump has sought to give states the option to reduce and restrict Medicaid for low-income adults. Throughout his candidacy and tenure in public office, Trump has made many completely untrue statements regarding medicine and science. While these statements do not carry the weight of policy, they do further destroy the credibility of experts who have spent decades researching their specific fields. A few examples:

“ Two years old, two and a half years old, a child a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very very sick, and now is autistic” — Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican Debates

Speaking on Climate Change in 2016:

“I’m not supposed to be using hair spray. But think of it. So Obama’s always talking about the global warming, that global warming is our biggest and most dangerous problem, OK?” Then again speaking on the California wildfires “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

These statements, while not dangerous in and of themselves, further erode public trust in science. Pause here and let it sink in that we have a president who is decidedly anti-science making decisions during what may amount to the most substantial threat to the health and wellbeing of Americans since the second world war. Don’t worry, the level of terror you are feeling right now is entirely rational. So just how has Trump responded to the existential threat that COVID-19 poses to ordinary Americans?

Consistent Public Health Messaging is Important

We have no such thing. On February 25, as President Trump boarded a plane to fly back from a diplomatic trip to India, Dr. Messionah from the CDC warned Americans that disruptions in day to day life may be severe. Not two days later, President Trump held a press conference in which he suggested that the number of cases in the U.S. was going “substantially down, not up.” More recently, he has indicated that people could go to work while sick with Coronavirus and that the entire thing is a hoax to bring down his presidency.

“It’s like the angel of death for older individuals.” — Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, speaking about COVID-19

Since the beginning of the crisis, the Trump Administration has failed to test at all for COVID-19. While not testing, the administration regularly lauded itself for the lack of confirmed cases and claimed that the virus was entirely contained (even while the CDC said differently). South Korea and China have run a combined total of over 200,000 tests while the United States has run less than 4,000 as of this writing. Testing is only now starting to ramp up, and there is no doubt that over the coming week, the number of cases in the United States will explode.

More recently, the Trump Administration has muzzled public health experts from warning seniors against high-risk airline travel and attacked the governor of Washington State (who is handling the largest outbreak to date) from the CDC’s headquarters. Saying that this administration is failing to respond to the greatest crisis that the United States has faced since 9/11 would be negligent because it would imply that there is a response. These statements and actions are confusing the response to a national crisis and will result in tens, if not hundreds of thousands of additional deaths over the next 12 months.

Every day that we delay closing schools in major cities, allow large gatherings to continue in places with known community spread, and don’t enforce mandatory home quarantines on those who have COVID-19, we allow the count of infected to grow by between fifteen and thirty percent. Italy locked down cities totaling over 50,000 people after diagnosing their first two dozen cases. They now have maxed out their ICU capacity in northern Italy and are being forced to triage cases to save as many lives as possible. Conversely, we just allowed a marathon of 50,000 people to take place in a city with known community transmission. Leadership starts at the top, as Harry Truman once said: “The Buck Stops Here.” Donald Trump has no such intentions. Sadly the United States is about learn the actual cost of the Trump Presidency.