This notion is so farcical that many Americans will rightly dismiss it out of hand (after all, we expect our presidents to be able to handle multiple tasks at the same time). But it’s not simply that impeachment didn’t distract Trump from coronavirus. Rather, impeachment indicated how he would respond, from his refusal to face facts, his abuse of public trust for private gain and his sidelining of actual government expertise in favor of outside channels. All of these traits were on vivid display during Trump’s impeachment, and all of it has defined his appalling response to the coronavirus — with deadly results.

Trump’s impeachment was triggered by his refusal to face facts. In fixating on Ukraine, Trump held doggedly to a conspiracy theory: that Ukraine was the source of interference in America’s 2016 election and the home of the servers containing Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails. That belief drove his effort to extort Ukraine to tarnish Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden. That belief was utterly baseless, yet Trump clung to it, even after his first homeland security adviser told Trump repeatedly that the conspiracy theory had been “completely debunked.”

AD

AD

Similarly, in the face of World Health Organization projections, reports trickling out of China, and widespread coverage of mounting fatalities in Italy, Trump refused to face facts. On separate occasions, he claimed that the virus was “totally under control”; that the United States had “pretty much shut it down coming in from China”; that “within a couple of days” the outbreak in the United States “is going to be down close to zero”; and even that “we’re very close to a vaccine.” None of this was even close to true; but in much the same way his defiance of basic facts set in motion his impeachment, Trump insisted on it.

Trump was also impeached for using the federal government for personal gain rather than public interest, contrary to his oath of office. The whole point of Trump’s extortion of Ukraine was to withhold U.S. military aid and a White House meeting unless Ukraine would help Trump’s personal political fortunes by announcing a reopened investigation into Biden. Trump was, fundamentally, impeached for abusing public trust for private gain (and then covering it up).

That same instinct has been on display with the coronavirus. Trump’s impulse to protect his political standing rather than protect Americans’ lives burst into public view as he explained why he didn’t want Americans suffering from the coronavirus disembarking from a ship stuck in limbo off the California coast. Trump acknowledged that government experts “would like to have the people come off” but then explained why he disagreed: “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” For Trump, “the numbers” of infected on U.S. soil were all that mattered; he knew that coronavirus numbers would drive his own polling numbers — and, as with Ukraine, that was more important than America’s actual security. Just as Trump cared not about any actual re-investigation of Hunter Biden but about the announcement of a re-investigation, Trump cared not about the actual spread of the coronavirus but about the announcement of how much the virus was spreading.

AD

AD

Third, Trump’s impeachment was driven by his insistence on creating and then using irregular channels for running the federal government, even as he redirected that government’s actual mechanisms toward his own self-serving ends. So, as Trump relentlessly tried to extort Ukraine, he enlisted his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to do much of the dirty work, while also relying on trusted confidantes within government to bypass the career professionals. This was what former White House official Fiona Hill called in her impeachment testimony “a different channel in operation in relations to Ukraine, one that was domestic and political in nature.”

Trump and his team displayed the same hostility to actual government expertise in choosing to look elsewhere in belatedly trying to understand the coronavirus. There was no shortage of accurate information available on the virus from within the U.S. government — just look at how Anthony S. Fauci has become the essential voice for Americans from his perch at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But Trump turned elsewhere: He tasked his unqualified son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in turn asked his brother’s wife’s father, Kurt Kloss, to find some coronavirus information. Kloss, in turn, asked for help from a Facebook group. It’s an absurd sequence that makes sense only when one remembers that Trump distrusts and seeks to sideline genuine government expertise — just as he did on Ukraine policy.