Dana Milbank is an opinion writer for the Washington Post. In this recent column, he suggests that Trump hopes to defeat the pandemic by lying about how successful he is in responding to it.
In his “whole of America” approach to fighting the pandemic, President Trump has begun clinical trials testing his most promising antidote: Can the novel coronavirus be killed with a lie?
Trump has at times speculated that the virus could be killed by an antimalarial drug and an antibiotic, or by ingesting bleach or other household disinfectants. But he has never abandoned the regular application of disinformation as his primary defense against the coronavirus.
“Some health experts say the U.S. needs 5 million tests per day by June in order to safely reopen,” NBC’s Kristen Welker told Trump in an East Room Q&A Tuesday afternoon. “Can you get to that benchmark?”
“We have tested much more than anybody else times two,” Trump replied. “We’ve tested more than every country combined.” He went on to say, “We inherited a very broken test, a broken system and a broken test, and within a short period of time we were setting records. We have done more than the entire world combined.” And he said the United States would “very soon” surpass 5 million tests per day — a figure beyond his own administration’s rosy forecasts.
Let’s leave aside the credibility of Trump’s claim that the U.S. would “very soon” test more people each day than the country has managed to test in all of the past four months. And set aside, for the moment, Trump’s claim to have inherited a “broken” test for a virus that did not exist when he took office.
Focus on just one of his falsehoods: his statement that the country has done more tests “than the entire world combined.” Trump has said this over and over, and it has been corrected over and over, for it is demonstrably false.
According to an updated tally by Worldometers, the United States, after a painfully slow start, has done 5.8 million tests. But the rest of the world has combined done far beyond that number. Russia alone reports 3.1 million, Germany 2.1, Italy 1.8, Spain 1.3, the United Arab Emirates 1.1 million, and other countries have performed well more than 10 million additional tests. And the Worldometers testing tally doesn’t even include China.
Yet this disinformation, which in its repetition has become an obvious lie, is at the core of Trump’s coronavirus response. As he pushes to reopen commerce and schools, the country is relying on luck (a viral lull during the summer) and the ability to test people and track the spread. Though we are accustomed to Trump’s nonsense, we are now in a position where lives depend on the capability of a testing system Trump has repeatedly and consistently misrepresented.
Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler and his colleagues explore Trump’s tendency to double down on falsehoods in their forthcoming book, “Donald Trump and His Assault on the Truth.” “One hallmark of Trump’s dishonesty is that if he thinks a false or incorrect claim is a winner, he will repeat it constantly, no matter how often it has been proven wrong,” they write. Though “many politicians are embarrassed,” Trump “keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version…”
Now the country, fed a diet of such disinformation about the virus, is preparing to reopen workplaces based on the false assurance — 5 million tests a day! More than the rest of the world combined! — given by Trump’s repeated lies. What could possibly go wrong?
Speculating a bit, here’s a headline for circa-three months after Trump is elected in November, on the strength that it was under his watch that a vaccine was developed:
Half of Nation Dies from Quack Corona Vaccine CBK
Next headline:
Other Half of Nation Dies from Corona Virus CBK
Last Headline:
Trump Claims it doesn’t matter because most were immigrant or black people anyway. CBK
Catherine,
Love your last headline. So true.
I am an English teacher. So, I explain to the children of Trump supporters what a book is.
Bob Don’t you know that ‘book’ is a verb, as in “to book” or “I booked,” or to get out of there, especially if in range of some sort of intelligent conversation. CBK
As in “Someone asked Trump about responsibility, so he booked,” which is the closest he ever came to a book.
It doesn’t matter. These types of people are so oppositional defiant that they won’t see reality even as it is slapping them in the face. They have serious mental disorders and they relate to their leader….who has serious mental disorders. Fighting/arguing/pleading with these people is a losing battle. It is best to let them be, keep careful watch on what they do/say and fight the good fight.
Nonetheless, you, too, can do your part to fight the pandemic of willful stupidity that is Trumpism!
Here’s a very clear, specific timeline of how the president ignored, bungled and lied about the severity of COVID-19. Anyone that votes for a so-called leader that cares more about the stock market than his own people is delusional. https://thebulwark.com/the-ten-weeks-that-lost-the-war/?fbclid=IwAR1NEpgfUYu09RoMH2nuOow7WCkp19m8mRnswJF16r_c5No9LoshjaKMlsk
Trump is jealous of Goebbels who still holds the title as the Master of Lies. He wants that title, but Trump wants his title to be the Emperor of Lies.
Donald Trump, do you have your cyanide ready, and will you poison your wife and children, too, just like your hero did?
Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler’s will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; he served one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife committed suicide, after poisoning their six children with cyanide.
Well, everywhere they say, the numbers are going down, and people visibly start going out. I dunno.
April 29 22,000 1,300
April 30 20,000 1,900
May 1 31,000 2,900
Well, everywhere they say, the numbers are going down, and people visibly start going out. I dunno.