Trump's empty assurances echo from 2020
Flanked by White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, left, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, President Donald Trump talks about the development of the coronavirus vaccine at the White House on May 15, 2020. Credit: Getty Images / Drew Angerer
Six years ago this month, the COVID-19 lockdowns began. Serious public health mandates were in place. Workers were sidelined, schools shut and the economy slowed sharply. But President Donald Trump said in a virtual town hall from the Rose Garden, "I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter," which was two weeks away.
People wanted to believe in that milestone. Trump said he was giving the social distancing restrictions two weeks, then would reassess. "We have to go back to work, much sooner than people thought," he said on March 24, 2020. The first-term president noted that thousands of Americans die from the seasonal flu or in automobile accidents and "we don't turn the country off."
He'd already been giving various "back-to-normal" assurances. "It's going to disappear," Trump said the previous month. "One day — it's like a miracle — it will disappear."
Tragically, the World Health Organization did not declare the pandemic over with until three years later. That was after COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, developed in the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed, were administered worldwide. By then the U.S. death toll topped 1.13 million.
One key aspect of that story needs to be remembered. In February 2020, the month before Trump's warm vision of an Easter "opening," he declined to share a relevant but harsh truth with the American public that he knew and could have helped us decide for ourselves just how seriously to take the health experts' warnings. Under an embargo arrangement for a book by Bob Woodward, he told the author in an interview that COVID-19 "is deadly stuff. You just breathe the air, and that's how it's passed." He said it was more dangerous than "your strenuous flus."
The week before his "back-to-work" statement, Trump admitted to Woodward: "I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic." As if the American people, or the financial markets, couldn't handle facts that we were going to find out sooner or later.
The month after he was hospitalized for COVID, Trump lost the election. He returned to office early last year.
Now, under the second-term Trump, the United States is in another spreading crisis with deadly consequences which he has rather blithely called a "little excursion." He signals hope in a new Easter season that the carnage will end soon, with reports of prospective peace talks with Iran through Pakistan.
Officials initially suggested the conflict would last four to five weeks. It commenced Feb. 28. Trump continually speaks of key goals having been accomplished. But he recasts his objectives and keeps moving goalposts.
Wars are international embroilments. They do not have spigots that an individual can turn on and off, which makes their time frames confounding, even to prediction markets.
On Tuesday, oil prices shot back up over $100 a barrel after new aerial fighting dimmed hopes of an end and Tehran remained in control of the Strait of Hormuz.
This March week has an eerie echo of 2020. We cannot be sure where this new global disorder is headed. We listen for how the conflict unfolds and spreads, and whom it affects. We again follow distressing numbers, wonder what the U.S. government plans to do, and whom in authority to believe.
Americans are back to watching patiently, one day at a time, and hoping anew for the return of a wider sense of normalcy. Once again, amid a global disturbance, we cannot know what to expect from the White House.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
