Trump and his outriders contend that, while mass death is not ideal, it’s better than allowing the US economy to stall. Some, like Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, are explicit, urging the elderly to risk their lives so that their grandchildren might enjoy the fruits of uninterrupted American capitalism. “If that’s the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said. He was taking his cue from Trump who, while not putting it quite as baldly, has been quite clear. If coronavirus is a stick-up artist asking America, “Your money or your life”, Trump’s response has been: “Take the lives of the old and the weak: I want the money.”
Of course, no such choice is available. Even if Trump were to get his way, ditching social distancing and having the US open for business by Easter, the disease would not politely confine its appetite to the groups Trump has deemed dispensable. Instead the virus would run rampant, infecting an estimated half the population. Not that Trump would know or recognise that, thanks to a second character trait that, like the void where his sense of compassion should be, is so fatefully, and fatally, determining the US response to this pandemic: namely, his disregard for science.
“This is just my hunch,” he said as he dismissed a projection of the likely Covid-19 death rate by the World Health Organization as “a false number”. On Thursday, he said “I have a feeling” that New York would need far fewer ventilators than the tens of thousands the state has requested. “You know, you go into major hospitals sometimes, they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying can we order 30,000 ventilators?” An imbecile at the head of the US government would always be a problem. But an imbecile so narcissistic that he elevates his own stunted knowledge above the judgment of medicine and science is a calamity.
