2. Trump’s only able to insist there was no financial crisis, repeating the mantra of sealed borders as if they would secure the markets, even as supply global chains were interrupted in unprecedented ways–the disruption of supply chains, Chinese production, and the possibilities of global resilience seemed to depend on the United States’ continued abilities to gain loans. While worries about shipping shortages voiced in February seemed to recede into the past, we were in danger of retreating into further isolationism in response to a global pandemic, unclear how to navigate it, as the manufacturing superpower of China was seemingly all but paralyzed, but telling America that it should rest assured as secured, and relatively few cases existed in the borders on that day–as if the fears of the pandemic sewed by the declaration of the World Health Organization was quite overblown.
Seated in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk, Trump mustered calm to argue that the pandemic was being fully addressed in national terms and would wash through, two days after the World Health Organization had declared a global pandemic. The President did not look that confident as he addressed the nation, however, despite the assembled accoutrements of authority at the resolute desk for the public address, almost out of place–offering little security to the nation or the world–
–as if he were having difficulty to control his delivery during an actual emergency that was not in his control, and he had let spin out of control, as industry production of technologies crucial to Silicon Valley for smart watches, notebooks, as well as httpantibiotics, hand sanitizer, and vitamins were endangered–but as we turned attention to national health.
As tried to calm growing panic from his padded seat, as all that was clear was that, during a multiple lies, half-truths and disconnects of his address, Trump sought to assert his ability to dominate the national news, clenching his hands as if to conceal some undoubtedly sweaty palms.
In casting the coronavirus’ spread in national terms, Trump seems oddly keen to offer disinformation to the nation by falsely mapping its contagious spread, parsing a global pandemic as a national triumph even as we can map confirmed cases of its spread across all fifty states, and the numbers where the coronavirus was incubating were untold factors more. Indeed, the chlorpoleths were misleading, suggesting dots of concentration, for cases dispersed over space–but resembled a rubella rash of pink or red spots, presenting themselves as a national annoyance. Not to mention that the numbers of confirmed cases were undercounts, and “reported deaths” surely were only a taste for how American populations were woefully underprepared to react to the infection.
By heralding victories, even as no proven treatment for the new coronavirus existed, he conveyed an illusion of progress–or tried to do so–by tired promises. He stumbled clumsily across multi-syllabic drugs an ever-ready teleprompter, as if were a magic bullet that would soon be in peoples’ hands, sustaining the fiction of “exciting” nature of cures “I’ve heard even better about,” from antimalarials like choloroquine, often used as an anti-anxiety or the experimental antiviral Remdesivir, first developed as a treatment for Ebola, hocking remedies of questionable efficacy. The drugs produced by American biotech companies might have been attempts to get their stock to spike, more than to help the nation. Trump rather comically stumbled over their syllables from a teleprompter.
Both clinically untested drugs he prized as potential game changers late in the game were soon hoarded–forcing companies to halt distribution or more responsible folk plead people not to hoard a crucial component of flu medicines and retrovirals, lest panicked desperation lead to hoarding an effective drug, and his own ability to cut red tape that would deliver “anti-viral therapies” that did not exist. Some of believers in the utility of the chloroquine drug ingested enough of the non-pharmaceutical form of the antimalarial intended for aquariums to die. Much of the nation was turinng to Wikipedia to get a handle on COVID-19, on which a good share of Americans already rely to diagnose their illness–over a third, or 35%–it was not surprising that Wikipedia page views boomed, with the English article receiving 1.1 million views, a jump of 30% from the previous day, and Trump offered no clearer guidance, save that his restrictions on travel to and from China demand recognition as a “life-saving move.”
In short, the nation should understand it was lucky. But here was already a deepening sense that our circumstances had all changed, but our President’s seems as if it hadn’t. The nation’s relation to the virus was destabilized, but Trump fell back on mapping coronavirus in terrifyingly familiar terms as a national plot. He persisted to call the Coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” as if to keep it at bay, confusing a global pandemic with a foreign country. As he did so, President Trump lied outright as he promised the nations that remedies soon available, before any clinical testing was begun, vaunting the “boldest step of all” in closing the national border to some travel from China. This narrative of border-closure was long familiar, and scarily similar to how he has boasted of having solved other national “crises” by a magic bullet of border closure.
2. The nation didn’t know that Trump’s investment in the company producing the antimalarial probably led to his purchase of a reserve of the drug, or that he probably heard of it from the company that produced it.
But there were no approved antivirals on offer, if testing by the National Institute of health recently began on Remdevisir, the drug used in Ebola, MERS and SARS, caused by related coronaviruse, of unproven efficacy for COVID-19, with results to be known only in April, with treatments made available as treatments by the end of the summer. Would these drugs, none tested and none ready to be marketed, make up for the dire lack of medical supplies in the national warehouses, where he must have already known few respirators, masks, and –which Vladimir Putin, no less, weeks later would assure Trump he could ferry by cargo transport to offer an odd lifeline “following phone talk between Presidents #Putin and @realDonaldTrump,” as the Russian foreign ministry tweeted. As Trump spoke, he had tasked his son-in-law Jared Kushner with enlisting private industry to secure needed ventilators, N95 masks and medical suppliesf or the nation, that probably led to Russia’s enlistment as a donor in a time of national need.
As Trump addressed the nation in mid-March, attempting to boost confidence, the contagion’s scope would have spread so far, based on the predictions of the Imperial War College COVID-19 Response Team, who predicted an estimated 510,000 deaths in England and 2.2 million in the United States infections would kill up to two million Americans, without pharmaceutical intervetion–a number that would peak later in the United States and affecting a far broader number, four times as large.
Trump was quite canny at rebranding, long before becoming President, but irresponsibly and sloppily rebranded the deadly coronavirus as “kung flu”–“I wonder who said that [first] . . . they would probably agree that it came from China”–he has masked the greater deaths and cases of infection that lie far outside Chinese territory and blithely normalized lack of health leadership in the United States. “It comes from China,” and will stay that way “as long as I’m president,” insisting on the truth-value of weaponizing rhetoric as if welcoming us to his latest, deadliest Reality TV show, as misleading choropleths aggregated cases to portray the national body in the earliest stages of complete infection, to late for any cure, and already incubating for twelve days before further infections would soon be manifested on future maps in better, if far more terrifying, detail. “To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days,” he announced, offering to adjust restrictions, as if the nation had been kept safe.
He soon corrected many of his slew of misstatements–on Twitter–but expanded a promise for free testing to free full treatment, and the tests have still not arrived. (Pence was clearly complicit with this disinformation; neither admitted that no treatments for the disease exist.). But the huge popularity of his regular Prime-Time news conferences suggest that despite his inaccuracies, Trump has become able to coast on a 90% appeal among Republican viewers, who seem to detect no disconnect between his distortions and trust, while a mere 14.2% of Democrats seem ready to sustain acceptance of the almost daily addresses that continued on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and streaming on ABC, CBS, and NBC, even expanding the primetime spots that Fox had given for all of Trump’s rallies during the 2016 election, despite the inaccuracies, distortions, and falsehoods that continue to be diffused daily. Hannity offered Trump airtime to question the mortality rates for the SARS-CoV-2 of 3.4% as just a āfalse number,ā given his āhunchā COVID-19 has a far lower death rate bast on āa lot of conversations with a lot of people,ā and security that there are āthousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work,ā insisting on an artificial overcount of cases of infection that have in fact been undercount.
National news agencies already suggested that we were at a potential medical crisis not in the sense of a break-down, but in a potential turning point in the disease’s progress–the ancient Hippocratic sense that is still retained for a turning point in a fever or acute disease, a point of ĪŗĻĪÆĻĪ¹Ļ where the expert physician would recognize “the determination of the disease as it were by a judicial verdict” that would lead to recovery, partial recovery, or death (Affections VIII), or when morbid residues of humoral imbalance remaining in the body could be eliminated, or fail to be eliminated, but the progress of the disease as it works its way in the body must be monitored with care, to judge the nature and acuteness of the disease’s course.
We were most overwhelmed as a nation by an acute imbalance in our relation to the world. Never mind the fact that China had alerted the World Health Organization about an unknown new virus with pneumonia-like symptoms, spreading within its territory–as if they judged WHO a shadowy, global organization. Chinese scientists quickly realized the danger of the virus ravaging Wuhan and the surrounding rural areas around Wuhan the unknown pneumonia-like symptoms, spreading within its territory, jumping species as it evolved into forms that can be infectious to humans. But was hard to buy for groups who questioned evolution, and doubted the data given the WHO–as if anything originating at WHO to be tainted at its root. Trump persisted, as if trying out a new persona for the occasion, to reassure the nation that the problem would “wash through” and we would be stronger for it.
Addressing the union solemnly in unemotive, grave tones, his thumbs shooting up in a weird pantomime of tweeting, perhaps stimulated by Aderol or other medications, as if flames flickering beneath his calm, as flames must have been flickering beneath his plush leather seat, his corpulence unable to conceal cresting COVID-19 cases over a thousand, in a terrifying asymptotic rise, conforming it as unable to be contained–while Trump seemed to treat it as nationally under control, the world be damned, the global nature of the pandemic only evident for those outside the nation and assuring the nation they would have “the best healthcare and health insurance of anywhere on the planet.” He had recently placed Vice President Pence, stalwart implacable opponent of the Affordable Care Act, who crowed before audiences of conservatives, āObamacare must goā as “we’re going to make the best healthcare system in the world even betterā in rural corners of Indiana, without having any other model.
As “best healthcare system in the world” becamea meme, if not a macro, crowed by President Trump and his surrogates, he tried to upstage the WHO declaration of a global pandemic by national boosterism for a bit. He promised incorrectly that the insurance industry would “waive all copayments for coronavirus treatments,” to an audience of many without health insurance, echoing a mantra Trump long promoted of “better healthcare.” But the current, almost sadistic, refusal to reopen Obamacare markets–as if allowing access to health care for the many furloughed, laid off, and summarily fired workers was a capitulation. Was healthcare.gov able to be opened to provide low-cost insurance for unemployed-to-be as confirmed COVID-19 cases escalated–an undercount to be sure!–was swatted down by “administration officials,” as much of the country worried about how to address health costs in a pandemic.
Meanwhile, the deadline for applying for coverage in the state health insurance exchange, Covered California, the extension of whose deadline in the face of the pandemic by mid-February sought to ensured as many had a health plan or path to coverage as possible. Applications jumped 41% above the previous year to over 418,000, as the state calculated in mid-March health costs for 170 million Americans related to COVID-19 in the open market would range from $34 billion to $251 billion or more in the pandemic’s first year. Known knowns already terrified in mid-March.
Trump combined assurances of calm with a disheartening abdication of responsibility, as the President left the nation hanging by repeating tired macros of tax cuts and travel bans, cure-alls predictably invoked, as if the virus were not our problem. Would the Make America Great Again agenda survive in an age of global pandemic? Ever more than in the past, this seemed so much snake oil. The teaser of the special sign-up window was not mentioned in the Presidential address, even if it could have extended the possibility for millions of uninsured Americans to gain coverage–as a record surge of unemployment–not due to a financial crisis but an economic interruption that is a health care crisis–but in an economy where most live from paycheck to paycheck, the health care crisis reveals the absence of our economic security. Indeed, the Trump administration seemed poise to take the pandemic as an opportunity to gut coverage for 20 million Americans who were covered by Healthcare.gov by striking down the Affordable Care Act altogether.
The stage props of the resolute desk, American flag, closed binder, flag pin, and those clenched, flickering thumbs, seemed to suggest that he was in control, as control was slipping from his, and everyone’s, hands. He seemed suddenly very small, as the words from his mouth seems to have little bearing on the anxieties that gripped the nation. Did the binder even contain anything?
Trump may well have begun to reflect on his own prospects of infection before addressing the nation. But his address–if concerning the state of the nation more than most of his State of the Nation addresses–veered little from his recent pooh-poohing of concern for the domestic spread of the coronavirus as just yet another meme of the latest Fake News and Democratic Party he had to swat. Dismissing social distancing as a tactic to deprive him of his beloved rallies, Trump had truly seemed stunned by the event’s dominance of the national news that he could not direct or massage in his direction.
Perhaps only after a number ofRepublican lawmakers tested positive for the virus after being exposed to it a conservative networking conference, and other with whom he had partied with Bolsonaro at his private resort Mar-a-Lago began to self-quarantine, festive partying with the entourage of Brazil’s right wing Prime Minister Javier Bolsonaro, sporting caps emblazoned “Make Brazil Great Again” as party favors assumed tones of rosy memories as news of their self-quarantining were processed.
Trump insisted he “did nothing unusual [but] sat next to each other for a period of time,’ as if it was a Sexually Transmitted Disease. But in his address he suddenly seemed forced to recalibrate. Whether on not the exclusive club was a Petri dish by which the virus jumped continents to infect his inner circle, several celebrants tested positive the day before Trump’s address. The cognitive dissonance was astounding for a President whose public statement was to congratulate his friend Xi, in late January, for “working very hard” for the nation’s benefit, adopting a lens of national identity for a global crisis.
The sense of emulating a top-down policy with similar “transparency” seems designed in retrospect to conceal the critical lack of transparency in Trump’s response to the health care crisis, which seemed terrifyingly to be another chapter of disaster capitalism of the sort Naomi Klein described, Perhaps members of Trump’s cabinet–from Vice President Mike Pence, poster boy for allowing the oligarchy to capitalize off of crisis, instead of public aid, to Steve Mnuchin, foreclosure king–took time to school President Trump in its doctrine: to ignore those living in poverty, the uninsured, or homeless, but bolster the national economy.
Trump’s assumption of removed gravitas in the Oval Office, if forced by circumstances, broke from character, but served to keep his Presidency and US markets afloat. After pooh-poohing coronavirus concerns as the latest partisan plot to tank his Presidency, Trump sat rigidly before the teleprompter, channeling a military demeanor or just immobilized by events, clasped hands only parted once in ten minutes to assuring national viewers–and markets–trying with as much confidence as he could to plead his audience beleive that “The virus will not have a chance against us.” If this was a modulation of the assurance on January 22 that “We have it totally under control,” the passive assertion a month later of a conviction that “It will disappear” seemed not to hold much water, and he intensified the self-congratulatory backslapping of March 6 that “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down” or the boast of a “perfectly coordinated and fine-tuned plan for keeping it under control.”
Exactly who was “us” was never made more clear in the short address, but he seemed to be pleading that this was really not a big deal in providing the most statesman like address he attempted in memory, summoning the accouterments of his office to speak from behind the Resolute Desk to conceal the evidence of his mismanagement of a true national emergency, after the manufacturing of several false ones. Sounding grave, he tried to spin as best possible, but looked particularly pained in telling us that this, too, would pass, or “wash through,” as he put it, suggesting an awareness of its rootedness in the GI tract, but using a disturbing image he professed not to see why folks disliked to express how we’d be all the better for having had it in the first place.
Trump tried his best to sustain that the average American was not at risk,– although the different demeanor with which he addressed the nation disconcerted at the virus’ rapid spread beyond China. He continued to stoke more than quell anxiety–not giving any advice that was reassuring or accurate as a guide to stave off the virus’ spread, and celebrating “our nation’s unprecedented response to the . . . outbreak that started in China, and is now spreading across the world,” but from which we would be kept safe–even if it was a global pandemic after all. Was Trump stalling as the new model of disaster capitalism that would take advantage of the Coronavirus spread in the most rapacious manner were being perfected?
Musings on Maps 
Such a good post!!! So insightful and spot on and horrifyingly true!
Painful to read but well-observed.