How Trump screwed up the federal government’s response to COVID-19

31 min readAug 28, 2020

This post originated from what was originally seven sections (six actual sections and a final conclusion section) in my previous post, in which I aimed to outline all the reasons that Donald Trump has done a bad job as president of the United States. I decided that the part of that post focused on Trump’s botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic was growing too unwieldy, and so have chosen to spin it off into a separate post.

November 3, 2020 update: This post, like the original one from which it was spun off, will not be edited anymore now that the day of the 2020 election has arrived.

If you want to read detailed accounts of the Trump administration’s botched response to the COVID-19 outbreak, I recommend the following sources:

List of sections

This post is divided into a list of sections, each of which is numbered with Roman numerals and is listed in order below:

Part I: Dismantling and Cutting Crucial Government Agencies and Programs
Part II: Ignoring Repeated Warnings
Part III: Downplaying the Seriousness of the Disease
Part IV: Promoting Misinformation and Lies
Part V: Politicizing Science and Trying to Silence Experts
Part VI: Flouting Public Health Guidelines
Part VII: General Bad Decision-Making
Part VIII: Antagonizing Democratic Politicians and Politicizing Aid
Part IX: Failing to Ramp up Testing Early
Part X: Mixed Messaging and Confusion
Conclusion

Response to COVID-19, Part I: Dismantling and Cutting Crucial Government Agencies and Programs

In April 2018, Trump’s administration (led by then-National Security Council head John Bolton) dismantled the pandemic response team at the White House. This team served a very important purpose of enabling the American federal government to centralize leadership and enable cooperation in identifying and responding to infectious disease threats. It is much better, however, for this team to exist (and to have detailed outbreak response plans) before an outbreak starts, as then the federal government will be much better prepared to respond quickly and effectively to any infectious disease outbreak. This is partly because then it is not necessary to spend valuable time putting together a team and a plan after the outbreak has begun. Unfortunately, by Trump’s own admission, his management style focuses on keeping the number of employees low and fire people he does not need at any given moment. As the Atlantic has noted, this “is a vision of organizational design befitting fruit picking or hotels that staff up for vacation season, not the kind required for the sort of catastrophes presidents inevitably face.”

Trump has also repeatedly proposed cuts to the budgets of public health agencies crucial to responding to disease outbreaks, such as the CDC and NIH. Trump’s administration also shut down the Predict program, which was focused on identifying and tracking new infectious diseases among animals in the developing world, in October 2019. The program was created in 2005 under President George W. Bush and continued to operate throughout Obama’s entire presidency. The Trump administration also eliminated the Complex Crises Fund, a $30 million fund which could have been used to send out disease experts in response to a crisis. There were multiple CDC officers working in China before the COVID-19 outbreak had begun, but under the Trump administration, the last of these officers was called back to the US in July 2019.

Response to COVID-19, Part II: Ignoring Repeated Warnings

Trump was warned numerous times about the potential seriousness of a pandemic in general and a COVID-19 pandemic in particular, yet dragged his feet and refused to take aggressive action for weeks or more after receiving these warnings, which include:

A 2017 walkthrough exercise in which some of Trump’s top White House aides participated, in which the outgoing Obama administration briefed the aides on how to respond to a global pandemic. Roughly two-thirds of the aides who participated in the briefing were no longer working in the White House as of this March.
A 69-page playbook prepared by the National Security Council under President Obama on how to respond to potential pandemics. The Trump administration lagged behind many of the steps outlined in the playbook, ranging from efforts to procure PPE to invoking the Defense Production Act to quickly making efforts to detect the full scope of the outbreak.
Intelligence reports from January and February of this year warning of a likely pandemic.
Two warnings from Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, in January that the COVID-19 outbreak could escalate into a pandemic. Azar also pushed Trump to criticize China over its lack of transparency on the virus, but Trump rejected both this suggestion and the suggestion to treat the outbreak as an urgent crisis.
A January 29 memo from Trump’s trade official Peter Navarro urging the president to take serious action to contain the spread of the virus.
A February 14 memo from a group of experts in Trump’s own administration urging the president to promote social distancing, quarantine, and preparedness measures.
On February 26, Nancy Messonier, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, announced that the virus had reached the United States and had begun to spread here, and publicly announced a plan that had not yet been shown to Trump. In response, solely based on his anger and poor temperament, the president replaced Azar, the then-head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, with Vice President Mike Pence, and proceeded to stall on announcing social distancing and other public health measures until March 16.

As one of Trump’s own administration officials told the Washington Post,

“The system was blinking red. Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it.”

For a longer list of warnings specific to COVID-19 that Trump ignored, see this article in the Atlantic.

Despite the above warnings, it was not until March 16 that Trump took aggressive action on the COVID-19 pandemic, after refusing to listen to warnings from within his own government about the disease for weeks. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), acknowledged that lives could “obviously” have been saved if these warnings had been heeded sooner.

Responding to COVID-19, Part III: Downplaying the Seriousness of the Disease

Trump consistently downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19 early on in the following ways:

For a more detailed list of the many ways the president misleadingly downplayed the COVID-19 outbreak throughout January and February of this year, see this timeline on the website of CBS News.

As with countless other things, Trump later lied about his past statements downplaying the seriousness of the disease, falsely claiming in March that “I’ve always viewed it as very serious”.

In September, it was revealed that Trump acknowledged earlier that year that he knew that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was a serious and potentially deadly threat. These acknowledgements were made in multiple phone interviews with journalist Bob Woodward in February and March, and they contrasted starkly with his public attempts to downplay the disease as nothing to worry about. This makes it clear that Trump was deliberately lying to the American people about the seriousness of the threat posed by COVID-19. Trump himself subsequently confirmed that he had deliberately downplayed the threat posed by the disease to prevent a “panic”.

Even into September, Trump has continued to downplay the state of the pandemic in the United States, claiming that we are “rounding the corner” on COVID-19 even though scientists and doctors have said otherwise. Also that month, Trump floated the idea of “herd mentality” at a town hall — clearly a reference to the “herd immunity” strategy promoted by Trump’s advisor Scott Atlas, which has been condemned as dangerous by the World Health Organization and by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has already started to implement actual policies based on this deadly strategy.

In October, shortly before he left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after being treated for COVID-19 there, Trump tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” In proclaiming that there was no reason to be scared of COVID-19, he contradicted statements by his own doctors that he is not yet “out of the woods”, as well as the more obvious fact that the virus has claimed over 200,000 American lives.

Response to COVID-19, Part IV: Promoting Misinformation and Lies

For months now, Trump has pushed chloroquine and its derivative, hydroxychloroquine, as a miracle cure for COVID-19 despite a distinct lack of evidence for its effectiveness at the time (in March of this year). The FDA approved an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the drug on March 28th of this year, a decision slammed by scientists as having been made in response to political pressure rather than scientific evidence. By June, the initial lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment had evolved into a growing body of evidence against its effectiveness, leading the FDA to revoke its initial EUA for the drug. In addition, he has promoted ludicrous and potentially dangerous potential treatments for the disease, such as injecting disinfectant and somehow bringing “light inside the body”. He has suggested these ideas even though UV light only kills the virus on surfaces, not inside the human body, and injecting disinfectant would likely be both highly dangerous and highly ineffective.

On March 6, Trump falsely claimed that “anybody that wants a test can get a test”.

Beginning in early March, Trump began claiming that his purported “ban” on people in China entering the United States saved a huge number of lives by preventing people with the coronavirus from coming to the United States. The following month, this had morphed into the claim that this “ban” had probably saved tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives. And by July, the president was claiming that, by implementing this “ban”, he had potentially saved millions of lives. But no evidence exists to support these claims, and the policy Trump is referring to is not even really a ban (which is why that word was in quotes earlier in this paragraph). Instead, he merely implemented restrictions that did not prohibit people from Hong Kong or Macau from traveling to the United States, nor did they prevent over 27,000 Americans returning from mainland China in the following month. In addition, research shows that the travel restrictions that have been taken in various countries in response to COVID-19 have failed to effectively contain the spread of the virus, instead merely slowing its eventual spread. Not to mention that Trump did not even implement the restrictions until after the virus had already come to the United States, after almost 40 other countries had already implemented travel restrictions, and more than four weeks after first being warned about the virus.

Trump addressed the country about the coronavirus on March 11, and shortly thereafter, California became the first state to issue a stay-at-home order. Even then, Trump “spent much of the month [of March] broadcasting an unwarranted optimism about the trajectory of the virus and promoting potential treatments like hydroxychloroquine.” On March 19, Trump falsely claimed that the FDA had approved hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.

In July, a tweet retweeted by Trump containing a misinformation-filled video about COVID-19 was removed by Twitter. The video claims, without evidence, that a mixture of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromax is a cure for COVID-19, and that wearing a mask is unnecessary.

In August, another Trump post (this one tweeted by the president’s campaign account rather than by the president himself) was removed by both Twitter and Facebook because it contained a false claim that children are “almost immune” to the coronavirus. Later that month, another tweet (this one was just retweeted by Trump) was removed by Twitter because it made a false claim about the CDC and COVID-19 deaths.

In October, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that a CDC study had shown that 85% of people who wear masks contract COVID-19.

For a more detailed discussion of Trump’s spreading of COVID-19-related misinformation, see this recent paper in the peer-reviewed American Review of Public Administration.

Response to COVID-19, Part V: Politicizing Science and Trying to Silence Experts

As U.S. News & World Report has noted,

Experts warn the U.S. has suffered from a lack of clear, science-based messaging during the pandemic — typically provided by the CDC. But Trump and the White House have kept the agency at arm’s length since the early days, when it botched development of a test kit, delaying tracking efforts.

Below, I will summarize some of the many concerns that scientists have expressed about the Trump administration attempting to politicize public health and other scientific disciplines related to COVID-19.

In March of this year, the Trump administration tried to sideline public health experts and argue that their assessments of the coronavirus pandemic were overly pessimistic. These efforts included silencing the CDC and modifying its guidelines, as well as attempting to undermine the credibility of NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the leading infectious disease experts in the country. Trump has also attacked the CDC’s own guidelines, which contributes to decreased trust in the crucial public health agency and its work.

In early March, the Trump administration blocked a recommendation from CDC experts to advise older adults not to take commercial flights. Also in March, the Trump administration directed the CDC not to advise Americans over 60 to stay in their homes whenever possible. In April, the Trump administration demoted Rick Bright from his HHS position. Bright has said that he was demoted in retaliation for speaking out about the seriousness of the COVID-19 outbreak and opposing the use of hydroxychloroquine.

On April 30, Trump allowed his administration’s social distancing guidelines to expire. He claimed that the guidelines would “be fading out, because now the governors are doing it”. This ignores the fact that testing was still not widely available at the time, as it would need to be for reopening to be achieved safely, and it created a muddled message regarding social distancing. Furthermore, at the time, more than half of states were planning to ease their COVID-19 restrictions. On the same day Trump let the guidelines expire, claiming that shortages of ventilators and other medical supplies were no more, his own administration officials repeatedly explained to him on a conference call that this was not true.

In May, the administration removed CDC recommendations discouraging specific religious gatherings, namely the meeting of choirs and the reuse of communion cups.

In June, Trump publicly stated that he had told his staff to reduce the number of COVID-19 tests being conducted to make it look like there were fewer cases than there actually are. His staff tried to insist that he was joking, but Trump later made clear that he was dead serious (though he claimed that he did not explicitly order his staff to reduce testing, only that doing so would make the United States look better).

When the CDC published its guidelines on school reopening in July, Trump expressed his anger in the form in which he so often does — a Tweet. He attacked the guidelines as too stringent and announced his intention to meet with the CDC to express his disapproval. Two weeks later, the CDC caved to the president’s wishes by issuing new school reopening guidelines emphasizing the relatively low risk of COVID-19 to school-aged children. Four former directors of the CDC wrote in the Washington Post that this conflict represents the latest in a series of “repeated efforts to subvert sound public health guidelines introduce chaos and uncertainty while unnecessarily putting lives at risk”. CDC Director Robert Redfield later caved to Trump’s criticisms, announcing that his agency’s guidelines should not “be used as a rationale to keep schools closed”.

This July, Trump even threatened to cut funding from schools if they do not reopen this fall, which he cannot do, because only Congress controls the amount of federal funding that schools receive. This threat was promptly condemned by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as by teachers’ unions and school superintendents.

This August, Trump’s administration ordered the CDC to change their testing guidelines to recommend that most people who had been exposed to the virus but were asymptomatic did not need to be tested. The change has been widely criticized by public health experts. Fauci has made it clear that asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 is, in fact, a big problem, and that he does not want this change to send the contrary message. He told CNN: “I am concerned about the interpretation of these [CDC] recs and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact, it is.” He also could not have signed off on the guidelines since they were finalized while he was undergoing surgery.

Also in August, Trump claimed that federal agencies in his own government were intentionally refusing to approve convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19 until after the election. Previously, Trump had frequently praised convalescent plasma for its supposed effectiveness to treat COVID-19, even once describing it as a “beautiful ingredient”. And later that month, the FDA caved to Trump’s pressure and issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for convalescent plasma, which Trump’s own press secretary described as a “major therapeutic breakthrough” — despite a distinct lack of compelling scientific evidence for its effectiveness. As Arthur Caplan has pointed out, there have been no randomized controlled trials of convalescent plasma, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America opposed authorizing its widespread use based on the lack of existing evidence from such trials. Trump held a press briefing just before the Republican National Convention in which he falsely claimed that this plasma had been “proven to reduce mortality by 35%”. On August 22, Trump attacked the FDA as the “deep state” on Twitter, alleging without evidence that they were intentionally delaying the development of vaccines and other treatments for COVID-19.

This September, it was revealed that the Trump administration was trying to reduce the number of COVID-19 tests being performed specifically to reduce the number of reported cases, thereby making Trump’s handling of the pandemic look better. Also in September, it was revealed that Trump administration officials had been trying to interfere with the widely-trusted Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report produced by the CDC. Many of these efforts were led by Michael Caputo, who was appointed as the spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services this April despite having no medical or scientific expertise. The efforts focused on altering the contents of the scientific report to make them align more closely with Trump’s public statements. Specific actions the administration took included trying to block publication of reports on hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, as well as trying to delay a June study of COVID-19 statistics in 10 U.S. states and another study focused on the spread of COVID-19 at a sleep-away camp in Georgia. These attempts by political appointees to interfere with the scientific process of a respected public health agency were roundly decried by scientists. Also this September, Trump publicly pressured the FDA by asserting that he must have ultimate power to approve a COVID-19 vaccine. In response to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn announcing stricter standards for testing such a vaccine before issuing an emergency authorization for its use, the Trump administration issued a directive to Hahn demanding he submit a more detailed justification of his proposal for new, stricter standards, which could block the proposal indefinitely. As a September Politico article noted, Trump’s single-minded focus on getting a COVID-19 vaccine approved before election day, and his resulting meddling in the vaccine approval process, “has left a string of damaging episodes in its wake and hopelessly intertwined the delicate drug development process with Trump’s political aims.”

Response to COVID-19, Part VI: Flouting Public Health Guidelines

Trump has continued holding numerous in-person events without mask requirements or social distancing guidelines, even after local health officials urged him not to:

In June, Trump held a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma where nobody was required to wear masks. The local health department director, Bruce Dart, later said that it was “more than likely” that the rally contributed to a subsequent spike in COVID-19 cases in Tulsa County (which contains the city of Tulsa). Dart had previously urged Trump to postpone the rally, since it was held while cases were climbing significantly in Tulsa.
On August 27, Trump held the largest White House event yet to blatantly violate social distancing and other public health guidelines. Roughly 1,500 people, few of whom were wearing masks or practicing social distancing, gathered on the White House South Lawn to see the president speak on the final night of the Republican National Convention. Neither testing nor masks were required for the rally, and many Trump administration officials, including the 82-year-old Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, were seen at the event without masks on.
On September 1, Trump visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he not only refused to wear a mask but encouraged people to take them off themselves if they found it “more comfortable” not to wear them. He did this despite Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ July order requiring indoor mask wearing.
On September 8, Trump ignored the urging of Republican chairman of the Forsyth County, North Carolina Board of Commissioners, as well as the mask mandate ordered by North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, by refusing to wear a mask at a rally in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The size of the crowd was in the hundreds, well exceeding the state’s guidelines, which state that public gatherings should have no more than 50 people. At the same event, Trump mocked Biden for holding a rally that actually complied with social distancing guidelines.
On September 13, Trump held an indoor rally in Nevada in which he had thousands of attendees packed close together, blatantly violating social distancing guidelines. Most of the attendees were also not wearing masks. The rally also violated the state’s ban on gatherings of 50 or more people.
On September 26, Trump held a ceremony in the Rose Garden to announce that he had chosen Amy Coney Barrett to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Dr. Fauci has since identified this event as a “superspreader event” because many attendees were closely packed together and not wearing masks. At least eleven of the ceremony’s attendees, including Trump himself, have since tested positive for COVID-19. Nevertheless, the White House has decided not to contact trace attendees of the event.
On October 12, Trump held his first official campaign rally since he tested positive for COVID-19. The rally was held in Sanford, Florida, and most of the attendees were not wearing masks. Many of the thousands of people in the crowd were also packed shoulder-to-shoulder, blatantly violating social distancing guidelines.

Prior to suddenly and proudly wearing a mask in public in July, Trump had repeatedly refused to wear masks or downplayed their effectiveness in limiting the spread of COVID-19. His opposition to masks was one of a number of counterproductive messages the president has sent that following public health guidelines is unnecessary.

On October 2, Trump announced that he and Melania had tested positive for COVID-19. This occurred two days after an event he held in Minnesota with Hope Hicks, who began feeling sick that night. The event was a fundraiser, where neither masks nor social distancing were in widespread use. The following day, Hicks tested positive for COVID-19. The restaurant where the fundraiser in question took place has since placed 13 of its workers (all of whom worked at the fundraiser) in quarantine.

On October 5, Trump departed the Walter Reed Medical Center, where he had been treated for COVID-19, ignoring recommendations from his own advisers that he stay in the hospital. This came after he pushed for his own release on October 4, which his doctors advised against. Despite still being infected, upon his departure, Trump irresponsibly removed his mask before getting inside a hermetically sealed car in which the virus can easily circulate.

A Stanford study released in October showed that Trump’s rallies from June 20 to September 22 were responsible for a total of over 30,000 cases of COVID-19 nationally.

Response to COVID-19, Part VII: General Bad Decision-Making

As noted in section IV, Trump has made a number of false claims about the supposed public health benefits of his supposed “ban” on travel from China to the United States. In reality, this “ban”, at best, bought the federal government time that it then failed to take advantage of, which is why even a White House propaganda video implicitly acknowledged that the president did essentially nothing about COVID-19 in the month of February (other than downplay the seriousness of the threat, as discussed in Part III of this post). In the immediate aftermath of the ban, the administration should have scaled up testing, improved surveillance systems, imposing restrictions on cases identified within the United States, and ordered emergency production of medical supplies — but it did none of this. As a Time article from this March stated, while the “ban” created a delay in the spread of COVID-19 to the United States, “…not one of the dozens of experts, doctors or former public health officials who spoke with TIME thought that the Trump administration used that delay effectively.”

The Trump administration wrongly decided to focus on containment first, and then switch to community-based mitigation strategies only if containment failed. The president’s repeated insistence that things were under control, and that he had successfully kept the virus from entering the United States from China, also led communities to perceive that the virus was not an urgent threat and thus waste valuable time before beginning community preparedness efforts. As Time has noted, the administration’s initial myopic focus on keeping the virus out of the United States had major negative consequences: “…once it was clear that the virus was within our borders officials did not pivot quickly enough to changing circumstances,” which experts have noted were “entirely predictable.”

On March 9, Trump pushed back against local government officials who were taking the lead in shutting down their economies to limit the spread of COVID-19. (It was necessary for these local officials to do so because Trump had refused to provide the necessary federal leadership.) He tweeted, “Last year, 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.”

On March 13, Trump made numerous promises at a Rose Garden address in which he officially declared a national emergency due to COVID-19. However, an NPR investigation a month later subsequently revealed that few of these promises had come to fruition. This occurred in part because the administration wanted to partner with private companies to implement the promised programs (such as drive-through testing), but also wanted to promise significantly more than the companies themselves were capable of producing. For instance:

Within a month of Trump’s Rose Garden address, there was no widespread implementation of drive-through testing by any of the retailers whose leaders Trump introduced at the address: Walmart had opened two testing sites and CVS had opened four.
Similarly, the executive vice president of LHC Group spoke promising that his company would help to increase the availability of at-home COVID-19 testing. But a month later, none of the 20 LHC Group sites contacted by NPR were doing any at-home testing.
Finally, the promised Google website that determines whether someone needs a COVID-19 test and, if they do, directs them to a testing site never materialized: instead, one of Google’s sister companies, Verily, developed a website called Project Baseline which assisted the COVID-19 response process. It was produced in cooperation with the government of California (though it was federally supported), and was only available to the residents of five California counties as of April 13. Also, the president’s claim that there were 1,700 engineers working on the website was never true.

In March, after California’s and New York’s Democratic governors had imposed lockdowns in their states, Trump both praised these governors’ decisions and came out against a national lockdown. Even though Dr. Fauci called for the federal government to impose a national stay-at-home order, Trump refused to do so because he wanted to leave that responsibility up to the states. He pushed back against health experts in his own administration by slamming the idea of a prolonged lockdown and publicly tweeting that his administration’s social distancing guidelines could be allowed to expire after 15 days. He claimed that America would reopen “[a] lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting.”

Since March, Trump has persistently stoked xenophobia and discrimination against Asian-Americans by referring to the novel coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”, and more recently dialed up his blatant racism and xenophobia by referring to it as “kung flu”.

In April, Trump expressed support for often-armed protesters opposed to the shelter-in-place orders implemented in states with Democratic governors. He specifically called on these protesters to “liberate” three such states: Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia. Also that month, he falsely claimed that he has “total” authority to override the shelter-in-place orders and other coronavirus restrictions issued by individual governors. In addition, it was later revealed that in April, the Trump administration blocked a plan to send millions of cloth masks directly to every household in the country, which would have sent a stronger message regarding the benefits of wearing masks. The administration instead chose to send the masks to state and federal agencies and nonprofits.

Response to COVID-19, Part VIII: Antagonizing Democratic Politicians and Politicizing Aid

At a time when the president should be working with politicians of both parties to help combat the spread of COVID-19, President Trump has instead insulted Democratic politicians and limited cooperation with states:

He described Democratic Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” and attacked Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as being “way in over her head, she doesn’t have a clue”.
He made clear that he views the federal government as a mere “backup” to states in terms of providing medical supplies and responding to crises.
His administration has also made clear that it wants states to focus on producing badly needed personal protective equipment (PPE), even as numerous local elected officials urged the administration to step in to help. Shortly after declaring a national emergency regarding the pandemic in March, Trump told governors that his administration would not help them obtain PPE, claiming that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk”. Instead, his administration refused to coordinate the distribution of PPE, forcing states to actively bid against each other to obtain it.
He attacked the state of New York for supposedly demanding too many medical supplies from the federal government, though his administration repeatedly turned a blind eye to the state’s requests.
He stated on Fox News in March that giving aid to governors is “a two-way street. They have to treat us well also.”
He has given large quantities of supplies quickly to states when political figures who he agrees with ask for them, from Lee Zeldin of New York to Cory Gardner of Colorado to Ron DeSantis of Florida. Notably, Trump sent supplies to Colorado after Republican Senator Gardner called him, but the Trump administration had previously ignored requests from Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis (who had made requests through the Federal Emergency Management System and to Mike Pence directly).
In April, his administration gave far fewer ventilators to Massachusetts (100) than its governor had requested (1,700) or than the administration had initially promised (1,000). By contrast, the administration gave Georgia 150 ventilators (it had originally requested 250) and Maryland 138 (it had originally requested 200), even though both of these states had far fewer cases than Massachusetts. Of note, all three of these states have Republican governors. The Trump administration also sent Connecticut (a state with a Democratic governor) only 50 of the 1,500 ventilators it requested, while sending all 140 ventilators that Oregon requested, even though Oregon had far fewer cases than states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York.
When distributing aid to states, he sent only $12,000 per COVID-19 patient to the state of New York (a state he lost in 2016), but $300,000 per patient in Montana and Nebraska and over $470,000 per patient in West Virginia (all states he won in 2016).
He told Vice President Pence to not call the governor of Washington (Governor Inslee) or “the woman in Michigan” (Governor Whitmer), both of whom are Democrats.
He described testing as a “local thing”, urging states to get help from commercial lab companies themselves. He initially refused requests to increase efforts to obtain testing supplies and to invoking of the Defense Production Act. He only did both of these long after governors started asking him to.
He has insisted that states need to be responsible for increasing COVID-19 testing capacity. He has made this assertion despite insistence from a bipartisan House of Representatives committee in April that the federal government must take the lead in ramping up large-scale COVID-19 testing, as well as requests from numerous governors for additional supplies. Even as recently as July, the Trump administration has given many states far fewer supplies than they requested.

Response to COVID-19, Part IX: Failing to Ramp up Testing Early

In late February, Trump was continuing to dismiss the COVID-19 outbreak as nothing to worry about and “under control” in the United States, as highlighted in section III of this post. Other countries were springing into action at this point — South Korea, notably, had their first confirmed case on the same day as did the United States, but South Korea started developing a COVID-19 test back in mid-January. By contrast, as noted in Part VIII of this post, Trump refused to act to increase the availability of COVID-19 testing, instead pushing states to fend for themselves in trying to obtain it however possible. He did this despite the fact that the federal government has unique abilities regarding the purchasing and production of medical equipment that states do not have.

During January and February, as former Obama administration Ebola czar Ron Klain has pointed out, the federal government should have acted to roll out widespread testing in response to the numerous warning signs regarding the spread of COVID-19. The Trump administration’s rollout of testing was “woefully slow”, allowing COVID-19 to spread across the country undetected for weeks because the administration failed to distribute enough tests. As a result, by late March, South Korea had a per-capita COVID-19 testing rate more than six times higher than that of the United States, and by this August, South Korea’s COVID-19 death rate was between 1% and 2% of that of the United States. The United States took 55 days between surpassing 1,000 confirmed cases and 100 cases per million people and surpassing 1 new test per 1,000 people per day. This is the second-highest amount of time it took to pass this milestone of the 23 countries that fell into this category as of June 3. Trump has also falsely claimed that the reason that the United States has so many COVID-19 cases is because we have performed so many COVID-19 tests.

As noted in Part VIII, Trump has repeatedly attempted to portray COVID-19 testing as a task for states, rather than the federal government, to focus on. In April, he tweeted that “States, not the Federal Government, should be doing the Testing”. Shortly thereafter, he stated that America would be able to test 5 million people per day “very soon”, a statement soon contradicted by his own assistant secretary of health Brett Giroir, who said, “There is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even five million tests a day.” In May, Trump falsely claimed (not for the first time, either) that there was enough of a testing supply to meet demand. The same month, he contradicted experts by saying that America had “prevailed on testing”.

Response to COVID-19, Part X: Mixed Messaging and Confusion

The messaging from Trump and his administration more generally regarding COVID-19 has been woefully inconsistent both with itself and with actual scientific evidence. Trump’s public position on whether people should wear masks, for instance, has changed repeatedly, creating confusion due to these mixed messages. The administration has also done a very poor job of communicating the importance of not just mask wearing but social distancing and vaccination as well.

Trump’s optimistic public messaging about the virus left many of the two dozen governors who attended a February Coronavirus Task Force briefing confused, because the information about the outbreak being presented there was much more sobering.

On March 11, Trump delivered an address to the nation on COVID-19, and, like so much to come from this president, it created tons of confusion: he said that he would be banning travel from Europe and imposing restrictions on cargo, but later had to clarify that he was not banning cargo, and that Americans or US permanent residents in Europe would be exempt from this “ban”. Trump also said that insurance companies had agreed to waive copays for COVID-19 treatments, when in fact they had only agreed to waive copays for COVID-19 tests.

In April, Trump contradicted actual infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had said that the US needed to increase COVID-19 testing, an opinion shared by an overwhelming majority of public health experts. But Trump claimed that we did not need to ramp up testing further, saying: “I don’t agree with him [i.e. Fauci] on that, no, I think we’re doing a great job on testing.” As CNN’s Brian Stelter has pointed out, “Medical and science experts shouldn’t be forced to tiptoe around the president’s bizarre ramblings at briefings!” This is part of a recurring pattern of Trump publicly contradicting his own administration’s public health experts, evidence of both Trump’s unwillingness to follow the recommendations of scientists and the dysfunction in his administration resulting from his dogged insistence that he is always right.

In July, the Trump administration transferred responsibility for collecting COVID-19 data from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This has created considerable confusion in hospitals and public health departments around the country vis-a-vis which types of COVID-19 data should be reported to which agency. Epidemiologists point out that, while the CDC’s data collection should have been modernized, it should have happened within the CDC, rather than by transferring responsibility for maintaining these systems to the HHS.

This September, Trump publicly contradicted statements that his own CDC director Robert Redfield made regarding the timeline for COVID-19 vaccine development and the effectiveness of wearing masks against the disease. Later that same month, Trump sowed chaos and confusion yet again by claiming that Redfield’s statements were “incorrect information”. The same month, Trump again created confusion by claiming that there would be enough vaccine doses for every American by April of 2021, even though his own administration’s experts had estimated that this would not be the case until mid-2021.

Response to COVID-19: Conclusion

Trump’s failed response to the coronavirus pandemic early on was summarized as follows by the conservative National Review in an editorial published this March:

“[President Trump] resisted making the response to the epidemic a priority for as long as he could — refusing briefings, downplaying the problem, and wasting precious time. He has failed to properly empower his subordinates and refused to trust the information they provided him — often offering up unsubstantiated claims and figures from cable television instead. He has spoken about the crisis in crude political and personal terms. He has stood in the way of public understanding of the plausible course of the epidemic, trafficking instead in dismissive clichés. He has denied his administration’s missteps, making it more difficult to address them.”

President Trump resisted recommendations from many experts to launch a more aggressive federal response for weeks before finally declaring a state of emergency. Instead, as discussed in Part III of this post, he persistently downplayed the seriousness of the disease and ignored experts’ warnings, dismissing concerns about the disease as “alarmist” when Alex Azar raised them to him in January. If Trump had acted much sooner and more aggressively, like leaders did in South Korea, our economy would not have suffered nearly as much. This is evident from South Korea’s unemployment rate growing much more slowly than that of the United States since the pandemic began. A report released this October by a team of disaster preparedness experts found that if the Trump administration had shown more robust federal leadership and acted sooner in response to the pandemic, between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths could have been prevented.

The American electorate would do well to listen to the editorial board of the highly regarded medical journal the Lancet, which wrote the following this past May:

“The Trump administration’s further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.”

Or, if that’s not enough evidence of Trump’s egregious and entirely avoidable failures in his handling of COVID-19, just listen to these additional expert testimonials:

“The data establishes that a significant number of lives could have been saved if the Trump administration acted on the advice from the scientific and public health community. As the country faces a second wave of this virus, we need to hold leadership accountable. The magnitude of loss, caused by a disorganized response, will have devastating and long-lasting consequences for millions of American families.” — Irwin Redlener, founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University
“From the moment the pandemic was first identified, President Trump and his team have downplayed the crisis and ignored basic and widely known public health guidelines to curb the spread of COVID-19. To stop the ongoing epidemic in the U.S., it is urgent to examine the available data, identify the failures, call out the Administration’s relentless misinformation, and hold the Trump Administration accountable for its failure to slow the virus’s spread and the more than 200,000 lives that have been unnecessarily lost.” — Jeffrey Sachs, professor of health policy and management at Columbia University
“As he was playing down the virus to the public, Trump was not confused or inadequately briefed: He flat-out lied, repeatedly, about science to the American people. These lies demoralized the scientific community and cost countless lives in the United States…This may be the most shameful moment in the history of U.S. science policy.” — H. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief, Science
“The Trump administration’s disregard for rules, government, science, institutions of democracy and, ultimately, facts and the truth have been on full display in its disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic…Despite having vast scientific and monetary resources at his disposal, Trump failed catastrophically when it mattered most.” — Editorial board of Nature
“The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states…Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.” — Editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine
“This is not just ineptitude, it’s sabotage. He has sabotaged efforts to keep people safe.” — Jeffrey Shaman, epidemiologist at Columbia University
“They [i.e. Trump and his appointees] don’t really get the science. This is the rejection of any science that doesn’t fit their political views.” — Elias Zerhouni, former head of the National Institutes of Health under President George W. Bush
“The federal government’s response [to] the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been marked by a series of apparently disjointed, chaotic, and confusing statements and actions on the part of both the White House and federal agencies charged with coordinating the federal response.” — Cynthia Bowling, Jonathan Fisk, and John Morris, faculty members at Auburn University
“[Trump’s] magical thinking has led the US to the world’s worst outbreak — with a fifth of the world’s cases and deaths — and now to the virus spreading like wildfire through the highest levels of government. The virus reaching Trump is a grim yet inevitable conclusion to his longstanding dismissal of public health science…What Trump has failed to do is to adopt a federal response based on science.” — Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor at Yale School of Public Health, and Gavin Yamey, professor at the Duke Global Health Institute
“China’s quarantine and lockdown measures bought the Trump administration time to scale up its preparedness efforts. It could have used this time to put mass covid-19 testing and contact tracing in place, produce enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for all health workers, expand hospital capacity to manage surges in demand, and establish clear chains of communication between the federal government and state governors. The federal government did none of these things.” — Gonsalves & Yamey
“By making unfounded allegations against WHO and by stopping much-needed financial aid to the agency during a global health crisis, President Trump has damaged the integrity of his office and his government. Global health, and global health security, needs a strong WHO and it needs a strong US Government to support WHO. President Trump’s decision to harm an agency whose sole purpose is to protect the health and wellbeing of the world’s peoples is a crime against humanity.” — Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the Lancet