The Daily 202: Trump’s coronavirus blame game is part of a pattern from the White House
Carol D. Leonnig, July 14
Over the past five days, the United States has suffered a worsening resurgence of coronavirus cases indicating that — after six months — the most powerful country in the world has made little progress in controlling the virus and that Americans may indefinitely remain its prisoners.
President Trump, meanwhile, has been largely MIA on a question most citizens expect their president to address: What does he plan to do now to better protect the public health and return the country to normalcy?
The American people heard little from their president over the weekend on the worrisome infections spreading throughout the South and West.
From Thursday to today, Trump apparently preferred to spend his time on other things.
He wiped away the prison sentence of his convicted political adviser Roger Stone and golfed two days in a row at his Trump National Golf Club on the banks of the Potomac River. The president sent out dozens of tweets, including some that threatened 10-year prison sentences for protesters who defile federal monuments and statues, defended his border wall, and congratulated his Fox News booster Sean Hannity for a “big night” of viewer ratings on Thursday night, when Trump was his guest.
Trump has increasingly sidestepped responsibility for leading a coordinated federal response.
That behavior fits a pattern in Trump's presidency in which the president seemingly has no interest in or patience for what he considers the boring work of governing, several of his former senior advisers say, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He was not fully engaged for the hard work of defusing the pandemic, including listening to panels of experts, sifting through scientific models and making hard choices to craft a whole-of-government response, an option not seriously considered.
Trump's attempts to contain the virus have always been tentative.
In early spring, as his advisers pushed the reluctant president to deem the virus a public health emergency, Trump tried marketing, taking to the White House lectern almost daily to talk about the “great” job his administration was doing to tackle the disease, despite a botched testing launch that put the country way behind the curve in containment. Trump still routinely pans testing as a “double-edged sword,” arguing it only increases the number of confirmed cases and makes his administration “look bad,” while simultaneously vowing an imminent vaccine. He then tried saddling governors with the responsibility of tamping down the crisis, while calling to “LIBERATE!” states that wouldn't move to reopen quickly enough. Now, he is saying schools should move to fully reopen this fall despite major pushback from local officials and teachers unions.
That’s come into sharp relief again in the past five days, as the rate of coronavirus infections is setting records, suggesting America is back to square one in this health crisis.
Coronavirus deaths are on the rise in every region of the country. As happened in early spring, the volume of new cases is rising so fast, particularly in the Sun Belt, that testing can’t keep up. Receiving rapid test results, quarantining the sick and controlling the virus's spread is proving nearly impossible. Several major school systems and colleges in California are retrenching on their plans to reopen this fall, and announced they will instead have online classes only for the time being. CEOs are preparing for employees to continue working remotely indefinitely after Labor Day, as well.
The worsening pandemic cries out for concrete steps from the federal government. But Trump has stubbornly sought to shift the blame for the situation and sees himself as the victim of an unfortunate convergence of circumstances.
Trump’s most recent fall guy is Anthony S. Fauci.
Though never entirely on the same page as his top infectious-disease specialist, the president appeared with Fauci at coronavirus task force briefings, and the two seemed to be communicating earlier in the crisis. But things have clearly changed between the two men, with Trump apparently viewing Fauci’s grim message about burgeoning cases and the dangers of reopening as a threat. In the midst of the most perilous public health threat in a century, the president hasn’t met with Fauci in over a month. The doctor slipped into the White House yesterday, however, to meet with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as criticism of the administration's bashing of him intensified.
President Trump watches as Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks about the coronavirus at the White House. (Alex Brandon/AP)
In the past five days, as the news has grown more dire and Fauci has refused to sugarcoat it, Trump and his allies have sought to cast Fauci as error-prone.
In his Thursday interview with Hannity, Trump criticized Fauci as a nice guy who has nevertheless “made a lot of mistakes.” By Monday, Trump’s souring on the doctor had become part of a larger concerted campaign within the White House. A senior White House official anonymously gave reporters opposition-research-style bullet points of comments Fauci made about the virus that were described as misleading or inaccurate. They included Fauci’s early advice that people who didn’t feel sick need not wear masks and should preserve the supply for medical workers, and Fauci typically cautioned the situation was evolving.
The White House list doesn’t mention Trump's repeated inaccurate and misleading comments about the virus and the government's response, including his claim the U.S. could reopen safely by Easter or his recommendation that people with covid-19 could get better by taking hydroxychloroquine or possibly by being treated with bleach or ultraviolet light. The list didn’t mention when Trump in January insisted the coronavirus was “totally under control” and would create only a few U.S. cases, or when he said the number of cases would “go down to zero.”
“It’s going to disappear,” Trump said Feb. 28. “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
The campaign of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday attacked Trump’s effort to blame Fauci.
“Over 135,000 Americans have lost their lives and tens of millions have lost their jobs because Donald Trump spent the last six months disastrously mismanaging the worst public health crisis in a century, the whole time failing to heed the warnings and guidance of medical experts — particularly Dr. Fauci,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said.
So much of Trump’s response is part of the playbook he deployed during the first three years of his presidency.
Trump finds governing tedious, several of his senior former advisers have said. He likes to make decisions on impulse, and later, if those decisions blow up in his face, he tends to blame others for making them.
Though Trump repeatedly praised his defense secretary Jim Mattis as one of his best Cabinet picks ever, he later concluded the four-star general was “overrated” after he resigned in protest of Trump’s decision to pull U.S. soldiers out of Syria. Trump made the decision on the fly during a phone call when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked him to leave Syria. Mattis felt it was militarily unwise to exit the battlefield, which would just allow Islamic State factions to regain their strongholds. He also considered it unethical to leave America's Kurdish allies in danger, and inexplicable for Trump to grant this gift to Erdogan without any benefit to the United States.
When Trump was in Paris in November 2018 and didn’t want to go to a sacred memorial to fallen American soldiers in World War II, he asked his chief of staff John Kelly and another aide for options. They said he could blame his absence on weather; it would be difficult to clear the streets for his motorcade at the last minute and potentially worrisome to fly by helicopter. But when Trump got terrible press for skipping the event, with some critics asking if he didn’t want to get his hair wet, Trump blamed Kelly, saying he should have talked him into attending.
“He never apologizes,” said one former senior adviser who left the Trump administration. “It’s always somebody else’s fault. He can’t take responsibility for any decision.”
This March, Trump blamed the rules and regulations from the Obama administration for his administration’s inability to test enough Americans for the virus to control its spread at a critical early stage. He didn’t mention that he and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had feared that such rapid, emergency testing might be bad for the markets and the economy.
“I don't take responsibility at all,” Trump said.
Governing is boring, hard, uncertain. Blaming is infinitely easier.
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