The Most Transparent President

Seeing through President Trump's lies about the COVID-19 crisis.

The Shocking Revelation We All Saw Coming

I have to believe that we can all take a break from our respective media bubbles, listen to the president's actual words, and share the only viable conclusion: that President Trump misrepresented the danger posed by the virus because he feared aggressive measures to contain it would cripple the economy and ruin his chances at reelection. To conclude otherwise would be to ignore the evidence of our own eyes and ears.

This post got a lot easier to write yesterday, when Bob Woodward released a few remarkable excerpts from his upcoming book. Woodward's interviews with President Trump, tape-recorded with the president's permission, reveal a shocking disparity between Trump's public comments downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus threat and his private assessment that the threat was very grave indeed. "I wanted to always play it down," Trump told Woodward on March 19. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic."

Except, I don't know, is "shocking" really the right word? Was there ever any doubt that Trump was downplaying the danger to the public despite knowing better himself? I suppose there was always the possibility that the president was deceiving himself, too, in a spectacularly destructive bout of wishful thinking. But reading through the Woodward excerpts yesterday, I was struck by how little genuinely new information I found. All Woodward did was press record and listen as the president spoke candidly in private about something he has been doing candidly in public for months now.

In any case, I think we can all stipulate this grounding fact: that President Trump willfully misled the public about the danger posed by a dangerous virus because he feared "a panic."

His stated reasoning reminds me of an episode of the political drama The West Wing, in which president Josiah Bartlett is informed of a "presumptive positive" test for mad cow disease at an American cattle ranch. A debate ensues between Bartlett and his senior staffers about whether to disclose the news to the public immediately or wait three days for a definitive test result from the lab. This is all fiction, of course, but the fictional president's decision speaks to the kinds of gut-wrenching choices a real president like Donald Trump is surely faced with from time to time: "The second we say positive," Bartlett concludes, "beef futures collapse, and we lose 3.6 billion in beef exports. Fast food is deserted, supermarkets pull beef, it's panic. I want to talk to some more people, but in the meantime, we wait."

This may be obvious, but here are a few ways that President Trump's attempt to avoid "a panic" is nothing like that:

1. There was nothing "presumptive" about COVID-19 in February and March. By Trump's own admission, he already believed the virus was both deadly and highly transmissible.

2. The public already knew about the pandemic potential of the virus, and Trump faced consistent pressure, both from the public and many of his own advisors, to issue guidance and coordinate a national response.

3. People were already panicking, including many of Trump's senior aides.

4. Trump did not just withhold his honest evaluation, he directly and specifically contradicted it on over thirty occasions.

5. In his many public comments, whether at press conferences or political rallies or on Twitter, Trump has explicitly connected his concern about a "panic" to his concern about the state of the economy (namely the stock market), and his concern about the state of the economy to his case for reelection in November.

I know from hard experience that there are lots of things about Donald Trump that seem obvious to me, yet many of my neighbors see those things differently. But I have to believe that we can all take a break from our respective media bubbles, listen to the president's actual words, and share the only viable conclusion: that President Trump misrepresented the danger posed by the virus because he feared aggressive measures to contain it would cripple the economy and ruin his chances at reelection. To conclude otherwise would be to ignore the evidence of our own eyes and ears.

Not Whether but How Many

So while the COVID-19 pandemic is not and never could have been "Trump's fault," the many failures of his response speak to the great hazard of his presidency, which derives as much from the basic duties he neglects as it does from the global and historical forces over which he has much less control.

Generally speaking, we tend to both overestimate and underestimate how much power a president really has. For example, most economists think we give presidents far too much credit (or blame) for the state of the American economy during their time in office. Alternatively, we rarely praise a president for, say, cooperating with (or merely declining to obstruct) Inspector General investigations in the various executive branch departments, even though this actually has a profound effect on the health of our political institutions.

I think that Donald Trump's presidency inflects and amplifies both of those misunderstandings. I think both his supporters and his opponents tend to overestimate his impact on highly visible things that are hard for him to change and underestimate his impact on less obvious things that he has a lot of control over.

So let's try to avoid that mistake here by being very specific: Donald Trump did not cause the COVID-19 pandemic. He could not have prevented it's spread to the United States. No one else in his job could have prevented hundreds or even thousands of deaths in a country as stubbornly independent, globally interconnected, and politically dysfunctional as ours. He could not and cannot compel all Americans to heed sound public health advice, nor can he eliminate all confusion from the public conversation about a virus that no one had ever seen before ten months ago.

And yet, short of these absolute powers that would not have been available to any American president, there are many things Donald Trump could have done to save thousands of American lives and prevent the excruciating dilemmas millions of Americans are facing as the pandemic rages on into its seventh month. These things include some tasks as complex as proactively mobilizing public health infrastructure, and others as simple as telling the truth. So while the COVID-19 pandemic is not and never could have been "Trump's fault," the many failures of his response speak to the great hazard of his presidency, which derives as much from the basic duties he neglects as it does from the global and historical forces over which he has much less control.

As with so much in our politics, it's difficult to have a conversation about the president's pandemic response if we can't agree on the most basic facts, which are these (as of September 9, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center):

1. The United States has 4.25% of the world's population but 23% of the world's confirmed COVID-19 cases and 21% of the world's confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

2. 190,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 in the last seven months. (That's twice the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.)

3. The U.S. has 40,000 more confirmed COVID-deaths than the European Union, which has nearly 200 million more people.

4. The U.S. has a case/fatality ratio of 3%, which is higher than most, and an overall death/100,000 population rate of 56.44, which is way higher than most. In other words, COVID-19 has been more deadly than usual for Americans who have caught it, and way more Americans have caught it.

Maybe you have a source with more credibility than Johns Hopkins University that tells a much different story. If so, I'd genuinely like to know. I can tell you that most epidemiologists, including those at Johns Hopkins, believe that they are undercounting COVID-19 deaths. It's also important to note that, aside from the occasional dalliance in rank conspiracy theory, President Trump himself has not questioned these numbers. He has suggested, by way of self-defense, that the high number of confirmed COVID-19 cases is due to the high number of COVID-19 tests performed, an observation both comically obvious and tragicomically self-incriminating, since it suggests the actual number of COVID-19 cases in America is undercounted, as the experts claim for much the same reason.

But all this proves is that the American pandemic has been disproportionately severe. This may undercut the president's many assertions that America is outperforming the rest of the world in our pandemic response, but it doesn't necessarily lay the blame for our disproportionate suffering at the president's feet alone.

In fact, I think there's an interesting and important conversation to be had about what standard we should use to judge Trump's performance. Counterfactuals--arguments about how things would have turned out differently if one or two important conditions were changed--are really tricky. Take, for example, the recent dialogue between German Lopez of Vox, a generally center-left outlet, and conservative New York Times opinion author Ross Douthat. If you're interested enough to follow the thread backwards from this tweet, you'll see a range of estimates for the number of "excess deaths" attributable to Trump's mismanagement, depending on which other countries you use as a baseline and what abilities you attribute to a "normal" president.

But surely we have not become so cynical about the possibility of effective governance that we don't bat an eye when reasonable people are debating not whether a president has caused preventable deaths by lying to the public, but how many.

The Most Transparent President

It is entirely reasonable for President Trump to fear the electoral consequences of a virus that cripples the economy in an election year; but it is also essential for us to engage in politics in such a way that he fears our rebuke for his lies more than our reaction to the truth he owes us.

So, yes, it is difficult to disentangle the knotted threads of causation and responsibility that comprise our present predicament. This is the 21st century, after all, and the world has never been more complicated. Certainly there is ample reportage that Trump was ignoring dire warnings and pleas for more federal resources throughout January and February. This timeline from Axios includes ten such warnings in that time frame, which are substantiated by a mixture of insider reporting and documented evidence. And we can go back a bit further in time: to the "Crimson Contagion" exercise of October 2019, which found the administration to be dangerously unprepared for a pandemic respiratory virus requiring an interstate response coordinated by federal agencies; or to the elimination of a key CDC position in China in July 2019, or the dissolution of a White House pandemic response team assembled under the Obama administration as part of broader downsizing, or the fact that every one of Trump's budget proposals since he took office have included cuts to CDC funding; or to the transition of power in 2016, during which outgoing Obama officials emphasized the risk of a global pandemic, including a "tabletop exercise" for soon-to-be Trump cabinet members and senior aides.

I also think we can make some reasonable assumptions about how president Hillary Clinton would have handled things differently. There's certainly little question that Clinton, a famously meticulous student of policy and intelligence, would have read her presidential daily briefings more closely than does Trump, whose lack of curiosity and short attention span have been the subject of many insider reports (and on display in more public ways, too).

But if I'm being completely honest, which I definitely want to be, I really don't know how many Americans would have died of COVID-19 if Hillary Clinton had been president, and neither do you. President Clinton would've had no more direct control of Americans' behavior than Trump has, and it's not clear that she would have enjoyed the trust of a much larger share of the country, considering that she was the most unpopular candidate for president in recent history, except, that is, for the man currently in office.

I'm hoping this concession buys me enough credibility to make what ought to be an uncontroversial argument: In a crisis, our leaders ought to tell us the truth, even if they're afraid of the political consequences. And even before a crisis happens, our leaders ought to be good stewards of the public trust. The American system assumes that our leaders will also be human, and thus that they will respond to incentives for honoring that trust rather than acting out of a sense of pure duty that really isn't very common among humans. It is entirely reasonable for President Trump to fear the electoral consequences of a virus that cripples the economy in an election year; but it is also essential for us to engage in politics in such a way that he fears our rebuke for his lies more than our reaction to the truth he owes us. If I had to summarize the source of my dismay at the widespread support for Trump among many of my friends and neighbors--a feeling I admit I have not always expressed graciously--it would be that so many people I like and respect seem to have abdicated the basic civic responsibility of having high expectations.

I'll close with an interesting claim from Kayleigh McEnany, President Trump's pugilistic Press Secretary. Asked why Trump would grant 18 candid interviews to Woodward, who just two years prior had written another damning book about the Trump White House based on uncommonly free access, McEnany replied, "Because he is the most transparent President in history."

Now, this claim seems absurd on its face, at least to someone who has watched Trump dismiss Inspectors General in the midst of ongoing investigations into his cabinet members, publicly castigate Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from an investigation in which the Attorney General himself was implicated, threaten witnesses in Congressional investigations, fire multiple agency heads for perceived lack of loyalty, buck the longstanding norm of disclosing past tax returns, openly retaliate against whistleblowers in various executive branch departments, and lie more brazenly and prolifically than any president before him. And it certainly does beggar belief that Trump would admit on tape to willfully misleading the public on the severity of the pandemic out of an overweening commitment to transparency, rather than because he simply did not anticipate the fallout.

But McEnany is also correct in one very important respect. We have never before had such unfiltered access to a president's interior world. Not only does Trump himself speak from the id with all the reckless abandon of a man who has never really had to bother with the ego, but his White House also leaks like a sieve. It is remarkable, in fact, how many of the president's supporters rail against the machinations of the "Deep State" without considering why Trump himself, supposedly so singularly equipped to bend the state to his will, has been unable to stop his own senior staff from dishing on him to the press. And when we add the testimony of genuinely honorable men like Jim Mattis, committed allies like Lindsay Graham, Trump's own sister, and many others who have spoken on and off the record about the president's contempt for anyone and anything that does not seem to serve his own interests, we have to agree that we have never before had a president we could see through so easily.

My thesis about people who intend to vote for Donald Trump in 2020 is that most of them see through him, too. I think that's a much more generous theory than the alternative, which is that they have been duped. Maybe I'm wrong, but it tells me something that the vast majority of counterarguments to this post, whether you post them to Facebook or just think them to yourself, will not be defenses of Trump but indictments of the alternatives. You will engage in precisely the sort of counterfactual speculation I have avoided here, about an alternate reality none of us has seen. Maybe there's no escape from that endless loop of what ifs and yeah buts, but if there is, it can only be this: let's agree that Trump was wrong--consequentially, unforgivably wrong--to lie about something so important. Let's agree that he was wrong to lie even if the truth would not have been well-received by his critics. And if President Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or whoever else you think I like lies so consequentially and unforgivably in the future, feel free send me the link to this post, then wait with one eyebrow cocked in jaunty expectation for me to be true to my own principles.

But until then, let's remember that they're not my principles, they're our principles, and they're not worth sacrificing for a man as transparent as this.