COVID-19 cannot be wished away, Mr Trump

Editor's note: Mike Cormack is a writer, editor and reviewer mostly focusing on China, where he lived from 2007 to 2014. He edited Agenda Beijing and is a regular book reviewer for the South China Morning Post. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The fundamental requirement of any government is to keep people safe and to keep them healthy. Safety means preventing and limiting internal and external threats, through policing, the armed forces and diplomacy. Public health meanwhile means using the state to maintain and improve the health of the population, through branches of medicine such as hygiene,epidemiology and disease prevention.

In urbanized areas with dense populations and highly developed transport grids, epidemics could spread rapidly unless the state took action:laissez-fairegovernance was not enough, nor could private businesses handle the range of tasks demanded. So cholera, smallpox, typhus and plague once stalked world's major cities, but advances in medical science and effective government action have largely eliminated them.

Fighting diseases however requires rational behavior – to accept their causes and means of transmission and to act on the advice of medical science. For presidents and prime ministers this means, in common parlance, checking your ego. You don't have the answers. You can facilitate, you can listen and learn, you can apply, and you must communicate to the people clearly and calmly, but you arenotin charge here: the science is.

But such basic understandings seem quite beyond the administration of Donald Trump. This was perhaps predictable, but it is still an astonishing negligent response to a public health crisis. In the first instance, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney gave a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. He said,"The reason you're seeing so much attention to [COVID-19] today is that they (the media) think this is going to be what brings down the president. That's what this is all about."

Mulvaney is of course only echoing his master's voice. The source of this absurdity is Trump himself. Speaking before attending yet another campaign rally (so we can guess what, exactly, his priorities are), he said that the U.S. was brilliantly prepared for COVID-19, but also said:

"They [the media] are doing everything they can to instill fear in people, and I think it's ridiculous. And some of the Democrats are doing it the way it should be done, but some of them are trying to gain political favor by saying a lot of untruths…Some people are giving us credit for that and some people aren't. But the only ones who aren't, they don't mean it. It's political. It's politics.”

White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. /VCG

Then, as though evading responsibility for COVID-19 was not enough, he blamed the slide in the stock markets on the Democratic primary debates.

During his presidency, Trump has in some ways been an astute politician. He has stuck to issues and maintained positions which energize his voters, and avoided involvement in the many areas which do not interest him. He has effectively been the president of the culture wars, slinging verbal mud, trolling, rage-tweeting, and taunting his political opponents with adolescent epithets ("Mini Mike Bloomberg", "Pocahontas", "Cryin' Chuck").

Likewise his endless torrent of lies has not, ultimately, affected the well-being of most Americans. The stock markets kept rising and unemployment kept falling, as Trump was always keen to remind everyone. But Trump's act is only viable in times of relative peace and prosperity, when he can be a circus barker for his voters.

At times when people feel threatened – whether through the economy, health or defense – then facts matter, and the post-truth absurdities of Trump's manufactured reality must collapse and fall, as insubstantial as morning cobwebs in the face of a bullet. You can't talk away an epidemic, or blame others for it when you're in charge.

Trump's suggestion that COVID-19 is being hyped by the media is thus almost criminally negligent – for what if his supporters take him at his word and refuse to abide by any quarantines? But it's also horrendous politics. For at some point, the spin stops and the mundane matters of governance take precedence: the drains, the trains, the pensions – though Trump has shown no sign of interest in this aspect of governing.

The interests of his constituents are not his. The needs of his nation do not concern him. But an epidemic does not care about culture wars. It does not heed race or creed. Like the facts, it is irrefutable. And Trump will find that voters do not forgive a president who takes such little care of public health.

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