So What if Donald Trump Had Not Been President?

 

I alone can fix it.

To what extent does Donald Trump deserve blame for the COVID outbreak?  What would have happened if someone else had been in the White House at the time?  Could better leadership have stopped the pandemic, or is Trump simply a victim of bad timing?

James Fallows wrote a fascinating article for The Atlantic about the possibilities.  (In June). He focuses specifically on what might have been done to stop the disease before it reached U.S. shores.  I fully agree that this is the best approach.  There have, after all, been close calls before.  What was the difference this time?

The US has a program called "Global Argus" that tracts world-wide events for subtle signs of social disruption that may suggest an outbreak of contagious disease.*  When there are signs of an outbreak, the US can deploy medical and scientific teams to help suppress it.  We have been preparing for such an eventuality since the Bird Flu.  

By December, 2019, there were discernable signs that something was amiss in China.  The Chinese government (unsurprisingly) attempted to cover it up, the the signs were clearly there. Under the Obama Administration, the US had observers and CDC representatives in China.  Trump, opposed to international cooperation and determined to start a fight, removed them.  U.S.-China cooperation in public health matters was well established.  Trump put an end to it.  The lack of U.S. presence strengthened China's natural inclination to cover up the problem, because it made covering up a viable option.

Nonetheless the signs were there and not all could be concealed.  News of the outbreak began to appear in the President's Daily Briefing which Trump notoriously does not read.  By mid-January, U.S. officials were asking permission to return public health observers to China. Stung by the general hostility between countries, the Chinese refused.  Under a normal administration (Fallows heard the expression or some variation on it repeated many times) the President or National Security Advisor would have called his Chinese counterpart and let the Chinese know that we had detected a problem and were willing to discretely help in dealing with it.  The threat not to be discrete if the Chinese were not willing to cooperate would be implied but unspoken.  Trump did not act. With his exclusive focus on trade, he had shut down an extensive network of ties that might have been mobilized to communicate about the pandemic. And simultaneously, Trump's eagerness for a trade deal meant an aversion to anything that could anger Chinese leader Xi Jinping.  

When the severity of the outbreak became apparent, Trump's response was a ban on international travel -- but incomplete, and with no attempt at security after travelers arrived. Others recommended re-routing international air traffic to specific hubs, with screening on arrival. To this date, international travel takes place without screening and control. In fact, the U.S. had an extensive plan, developed under the Bush and Obama administrations, for dealing with a global pandemic. Trump was unwilling to follow any instructions left by his hated predecessors.  Faced with a crisis, he was simply unwilling or unable to act.  The bureaucracy to act was also weakened and hollowed out by his unwillingness to appoint competent managers.

In short, Fallows believes that the best opportunity for a competent administration to stop the virus was before it reached the United State.  I fully agree.

And one reason stopping the virus before it reached the U.S. would be the most effective approach would be that most Americans would not be aware it was happening and therefore would not oppose it.**  Once the pandemic hit the U.S., we have probably reached such a stage of political dysfunction that any attempt to check the spread would be impossible.

Our best bet would be a highly competent Republican President.  Jeb Bush comes to mind.  Jeb Bush is the former governor of Florida, a state that gets hit by so many hurricanes that it has regular protocols in place for dealing with routine summer loss of electricity.  If Jeb was unable to stop the virus from coming to the US, he would doubtless have handled it competently once it got here.  Republicans would trust him because he was the head of their team.  Democrats would trust him because he listened to the experts.

But for the most part, competent government that can achieve anything useful is against Republicans' most basic principles.  They call it "socialism" and consider it the first step to either tyranny or complete social breakdown.  Government is an evil to be destroyed, in an orderly fashion if possible, or by corruption and incompetence if not.  I am inclined to believe that most Republican administrations would run into a milder version of what we have seen with Trump -- simultaneously a belief that nothing really bad can happen when Team Us is in charge and a belief that any government attempt to stop the outbreak would be intolerable tyranny.

And if a Democrat had been in charge, Republican response would be obvious.  Republicans would simultaneously run around warning that we were all going to die because of the President's failure to protect us (see Obama Administration, Ebola) and shutting down any attempt to protect us as intolerable tyranny.

And, in fairness, there might be some method to their madness.  Recall the much-cited quote:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Apply this approach to fighting a pandemic.  It allows only one pandemic response:  To cut off all contact with the infected area.  Keep the spreaders of disease out.  It does not allow any concern for, or attempt to help, people in an infected area.  If any of our people choose to help, they do so on their own risk and cut themselves off from us entirely.

That was all Obama's opponents expected during the Ebola outbreak.  They wanted him to cut off all contact with infected area.  That included not admitting American missionaries who were working in the area.  Yes, they were our fellow citizens, but they were tainted and to be cast out.  When Obama sent the Army in to engage in disease controls, there were calls for his impeachment if even one soldier was infected.  And when a Liberian with the disease made it into the country and two nurses caring for him caught it, the rage off the charts.  But no one actually made any proposals to halt community spread.  Nor, indeed, were any such measures needed.  Ebola, though extremely deadly, is not very contagious.

I think this may also answer the puzzlement of some as to why the normal right-wing responses of fear and disgust have been suspended in this pandemic -- why Trump supporters have neither fear nor revulsion toward this virus.  The obvious reason (offered by the author) is that the MAGA cult has taken over and members are unwilling to admit that anything bad can happen so long as Trump is in charge.  No doubt this is part of it, but based on my conversations with Trump supporters, I think there is something else at work as well.  Fear and disgust are emotions directed toward outsiders -- toward the "Other" as left-wing jargon puts it.  Calls for masks, for social distancing, for thorough cleaning of surfaces and so forth are statements to Trump supporters that they are potential spreaders of contagious disease, that they are to be feared or (worse) seen as disgusting and a source of contamination.  And, in my experience, such a suggestion makes right wingers very, very angry.***

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*Global Argus relies on open source information, but the ability of computer programs to track open information these days can be creepy.

**There are probably American who have such an aversion to any sort of international cooperation as an infringement on US sovereignty that they would prefer out-of-control pandemic spread to international cooperation to stop it.  Fortunately, most of them would not know it was going on.

***In fairness, our side is not wholly blameless.  Whenever we chuckle about the need to decontaminate the White House when Trump moves out and Biden moves in, or talk about decontaminating an area after Ivanka visits, we are investing this disease with a moral stigma that will be an obstacle in controlling and treating it.