Election Contamination

Donald Trump’s sensitivity to the COVID-19 crisis is largely a function of his personal and electoral interests. He could not dismiss reports from federal health authorities who, on Tuesday, sounded the alarm affirming that the question was not if, but when COVID-19 would spread across the United States. What worries him, above all, is seeing the virus infect Wall Street, raising the risk that the country could stumble into a recession that might hurt his chances for reelection this upcoming November.

Whether or not one can call it a pandemic, 47 countries are now affected by COVID-19, which has led to some 3,000 deaths to date and infected more than 80,000 people, mainly in the Chinese province of Hubei. If 80% of the cases are benign, it remains that the virus is still a mystery whose modes of transmission are invisible, for it can be transmitted before the appearance of symptoms. And if only around 60 cases have been reported to date in the United States (there are around a dozen or so in Canada), preparations must be made in the name of the most elementary principle of precaution for the possibility of an epidemic spread of the virus. Thus warns Nancy Messonnier, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This does not exclude, for example, closing schools, she said, a decision Japan has made, starting Monday.

Accused of being irresponsible for declaring in recent weeks that COVID-19 would disappear in due time, Trump on Wednesday was resigned to take action by naming Vice President Mike Pence as head of a coronavirus task force. Who will this reassure? Pence is a religious ultraconservative who, as governor of Indiana, was accused of negligence during the AIDS fight. In addition, the American government expects to release $2.5 billion of emergency aid, while Democrats believe an additional $3 billion is needed. This suggests that Trump continues to pay lip service to his responsibilities, absurdly digging in his heels to deny the problem as much as he can.

But the backdrop to this lies in the disentanglement of the government in health care under President Trump and his Republicans over the last three years. It is perhaps not enough that he repeats over and again, contrary to evidence, that Democrats and journalists are “alarmists” and that the risk is “very low.” In this world of global supply chains, it is easy to imagine that a pandemic that began in China might bring to an end post-2008 capitalist expansion. Trump would be negatively affected by this, and surely already fears that the truth will catch up. Should the situation worsen, which experts deem inevitable, COVID-19 is bound to become a campaign issue in a country where millions of Americans have no access to health care for lack of insurance. And it just so happens that Bernie Sanders, leading candidate in the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, is making a case for a radical policy of universal public health care.

Indeed, Trump is behaving in a democracy as Chinese President Xi Jinping is behaving in a dictatorship. Beijing spent nearly two months hiding concerns about COVID-19, then minimizing them before finally acknowledging the urgency in late January, but not without suppressing all opposition to the official position, starting with internet users. Incidentally, Trump continues to extol Xi’s success. And this is how Trump, acting solely in the arena of partisan division and distrust of institutions, hangs on the words of Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host who accused Messonnier of being deliberately alarmist and working to hurt the president because she is the sister of Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who was at odds with Trump — because, you see, the rule of law and the deep state are one and the same.

And so it is that, in keeping with this conspiracy line of thought, Trump speaks more like one of his principal adversaries, the Iranian regime, whose so-called reformist president Hassan Rouhani has attributed COVID-19 to an “enemy plot.” It is a regime that is, itself, working to minimize the danger without much credibility, while those in the medical community are saying that the country is on the verge of a catastrophe if the government does not soon take this silent contagion seriously.