As we approach the four-year anniversary of Donald Trump suggesting from the White House podium that bleach injections could be a miracle covid cure, it’s worth underscoring that despite Republicans would have you believe, Trump’s presidency did not end in 2019.
In fact, despite all the other horrors of the Trump presidency — the family separation policy, stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues, the coup attempt — Trump’s mishandling of covid in 2020 should on its own disqualify him from ever again holding office.
It can be hard to remember now with the pandemic receding from view, but covid absolutely dominated our lives in 2020. And conservatives are eager to help you forget.
One particularly galling example on this occurred last year on Bill Maher’s “Real Time” show when conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said, “If you ask many Americans ‘Were you better off in 2019, the last full year of the Trump presidency before covid’ — or today — they're going to say 2019. Because their groceries, gas didn't cost as much money. Mortgage rates weren't as high. That's just a political fact.”
This isn’t a “fact,” but instead a game of Republican Calvinball where Trump receives a mulligan for 2020, when covid ravaged the nation, while President Joe Biden racks up every penalty from the pandemic’s lingering impact.
Republican politicians and officials have collectively embraced this disingenuous position. Rep. Elise Stefanik, new RNC co-chair Lara Trump, and Sen. Tim Scott are a few prominent names among the many Republicans who have recently suggested that Americans are worse off today than we were four years ago while skipping over the year 2020 like it’s the 13th floor in a building.
But a close examination of what actually happened exactly four years ago in the spring of 2020 — when the pandemic dominated every aspect of our lives — renders absurd any assertion that we were better off then than now.
By May 2020, US job losses were the highest since the Great Depression, and then there were the irrecoverable losses: The tally of covid deaths in the US for that year ended up being 350,831, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For context, there were an estimated 2,459 US military deaths in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, and 20,769 were wounded in action, whereas researchers estimate more than 900,000 covid hospitalizations occurred through November 2020.
Instead of listening to public health experts and taking steps to limit the human toll, Trump recklessly pushed for the economy to reopen and used his disastrous White House covid press conferences to tout unproven and potentially dangerous “treatments.” Do voters have post-traumatic amnesia about how grim 2020 was?
It’s possible that many people view the pandemic like a natural disaster. Biden shoulders responsibility for the cleanup and rebuilding, but it’s not as if Trump unleashed the virus or could’ve prevented it.
You can’t blame a president for an earthquake (although Majorie Taylor Greene recently tried). But the natural disaster viewpoint unjustly exonerates Trump, who wasn’t a passive bystander. He actively worsened the situation.
Everything Trump did wrong
The first recorded case of covid in the US was in January 2020. A few weeks later Judd Legum at Popular Information posted on Twitter, “I feel like more people should be talking about the fact that Trump fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”
Indeed, the Trump administration gutted the infectious disease defense infrastructure through shortsighted cost-cutting measures starting in 2018 — a year after passing a trillion-dollar tax giveaway for his billionaire buddies. The administration specifically canned the executive branch team that would’ve coordinated a response.
Trump then spent most of February 2020 minimizing covid’s threat. He called the coronavirus Democrats’ “new hoax” at a campaign rally in South Carolina. By April, when everything was going to hell, he lamented that the pandemic was “something that nobody expected.” However, former President George W. Bush had warned in 2005 that “if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.” Bush compared a pandemic to a forest fire: "If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it.”
Bush paved the way for pandemic planning, which the Obama administration continued. Only Trump was simultaneously arrogant and stupid enough to demolish what his predecessors had built.
Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden warned on October 25, 2019, that “we are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strength global health security.” This wasn’t just Monday morning quarterbacking, as covid wasn’t first identified in Wuhan, China, until December.
Biden later wrote in a January 2020 op-ed that Trump’s rash actions had left the nation thoroughly unprepared for a global pandemic. He also pointed out that Trump’s reflexive “America First” isolationism and repeated rejection of science made him the worst possible leader during a global health crisis.
Trump wasn’t simply in over his head with the pandemic. He was willfully, maddeningly obstructive and resistant to the most basic mitigation measures.
On April 3, 2020, during one of his covid pressers, Trump grudgingly reported that the CDC advised “the use of non-medical cloth face covering as an additional voluntary public health measure.” Then he outright dismissed this guidance: “So it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it. They suggested for a period of time, but this is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”
This was the leader of the free world, just a few weeks into the pandemic, refusing to model positive behavior. He’d spend the rest of his presidency, when not plotting to stay in power by any means necessary, downplaying mask-wearing and mocking those who did. By the summer of 2020, even such Republicans as Sen. Rick Scott from Florida, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey publicly encouraged wearing masks and social distancing. Trump not only refused to promote masks but told the Wall Street Journal that they were possibly more trouble than they were worth.
“People touch them,” he said. “And they grab them and I see it all the time. They come in, they take the mask. Now they’re holding it now in their fingers. And they drop it on the desk and then they touch their eye and they touch their nose. No, I think a mask is a — it’s a double-edged sword.”
Trump consistently undermined any mask-wearing guidance from his staff.
“We have urged Americans to wear masks, and I emphasized this is a patriotic thing to do,” he said in August 2020 but added, “Maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.”
CDC epidemiologist Robert Hahn estimated in October 2020 that as many as 12,000 covid-related deaths could be attributed to Trump’s negative or false statements about face masks.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pleaded with Americans to practice social distancing, acknowledging the personal inconvenience but stressing the public health benefit. Trump undercut him at every turn. During an April 4 press briefing, Trump infamously stated that the “cure cannot be worse than the problem itself."
“We're not going to destroy our country,” he said. “We have to get back ... we have a big decision to make at a certain point.”
The nation couldn’t safely reopen and abandon social distancing before a vaccine was ready. More people would die, but Trump refused to back his medical experts and prepare Americans for the long haul.
Trump’s blue-state blame game
States began imposing shutdowns to prevent the coronavirus from spreading in mid-March, and just over a week later, Trump declared on Fox News — as death counts steadily rose — that he wanted the economy open and “packed churches” on Easter Sunday, which was April 12 that year. Dr. Tina Tan, a board member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said, “Obviously Trump is not rooted in reality.”
By April, MAGA had started to revolt against any and all covid restrictions. Predictably, Trump joined the bandwagon. He could always whip up his mob into a violent frenzy, but he was either incapable or unwilling to steer them in a positive direction.
He tweeted on April 17 “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA” amid protests over Democratic governors’ stay-at-home orders.
From that point, a tale of two pandemics started to emerge. Trump had failed to build a physical wall on the southern border, and there was definitely no way to erect a covid barrier between MAGA-loving red states and the rest of the nation. We ultimately all shared the same air.
Trump resisted Fauci’s calls for a nationwide stay-at-home order in April, but as John Cohen, former acting undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, warned, “If you have one state that is very strict about reducing social contact, and you have a neighboring state that isn't, then infected people can go back and forth and spread the virus."
Meanwhile, there was an ongoing shortage of vital personal protection equipment in hospitals, and Trump openly accused doctors and nurses of “hoarding” masks and ventilators. He expected governors, especially Democrats, to sing his praises publicly in exchange for him doing his job, and states were pitted against each other for the equipment, which only drove up costs.
"It’s a source of frustration that there’s not more of a national strategy on procurement of these critical pieces of equipment that everyone across our country is going to need,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told NBC News in April 2020. “And when we’re bidding against one another and the price keeps going up, then we can’t count on the national stockpile to meet our needs, it creates a very dangerous situation.”
Trump responded by denigrating Whitmer, and it took him a week to approve a disaster declaration for Michigan. Originally casting himself as a wartime president, he soon offloaded any actual responsibility to individual states and declared that the federal government would only serve as “backup.” The lack of a centralized federal response resulted in a fragmented approach to the pandemic that differed based solely on regional politics rather than science.
By September 2020, Trump openly blamed “blue states” for the escalating covid death toll. He obviously didn’t back this up with data. He just suggested that if you excluded the dead from “blue states,” then the US numbers overall would’ve been more in line with other nations. Trump never really considered himself president of the entire country, but rather the exalted leader of those who voted for him.
This is especially sickening because Vanity Fair reported that the Trump administration had dismissed a national pandemic plan as bad politics. It was deemed preferable to let the virus rage through blue states — where it was disproportionately killing people of color — and blame the Democratic governors. Trump’s advisers had to tell him directly that the virus was hurting “our people” — white MAGA voters in Republican-run states.
Trump’s malicious incompetence
Trump was rightly mocked for his bizarre press conference on April 23, 2020, when he suggested injecting people with disinfectant (not specifically bleach!) or maybe UV light.
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,” he said, incorrectly and insanely. “One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.” (Watch below.)
This was consistent with his carnival barker approach to covid. He pitched quick fixes and snake oil in the form of hydroxychloroquine and other unproven drugs. That was more exciting to him than following simple science.
"Erythromycin, which will kill certain things that you don't want living within your body,” he said on April 5. “It's a powerful drug ... what do you have to lose?”
Yet wearing a simple facial covering was too great a burden.
We can focus so much on Trump’s outright stupidity, though, that we forget how deliberately evil he is. Bob Woodward revealed in his book “Rage” that Trump was fully aware that the coronavirus was more than just a bad flu. As early as January 28, his national security adviser Robert O’Brien warned Trump that covid would become “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency. This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Woodward on February 7. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
Trump’s public statements often contradicted his public health advisers and created confusion. He repeatedly claimed the US had the virus “under control,” when this simply wasn’t true.
Trump administration officials insisted he was simply being “optimistic” when he’d claim the virus would “disappear” miraculously. His interview with Woodward, however, made it clear that he understood how dire the situation was. He just didn’t care.
“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.”
The “panic” he wished to avoid had to do with the tanking stock market and by extension his decreasing odds of being reelected. (It wasn’t a coincidence that Trump started planting seeds for his Big Lie around this time.) As anxiety spread and the market suffered accordingly, Trump dismissed and downplayed the pandemic. Yet he admitted to Woodward that the virus was a growing threat to the nation.
"Now it's turning out it's not just old people, Bob. But just today, and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It's not just old, older … young people, too, plenty of young people."
This is important because a MAGA narrative would soon emerge that claimed covid was only a real threat to the elderly or those with pre-existing health conditions. Although young, otherwise healthy people weren’t at risk to the same degree as older people, they were far from immune. Young people are potential spreaders and are at risk for health complications and death.
Trump intentionally lied to the public for his own political gain. He feared he’d lose the presidential election with an economy in free fall, but his deceit didn’t prevent that outcome. Worse, according to a Columbia University study released in May 2020, 61.6 percent of deaths and 55 percent of infections nationwide by that point could have been avoided if Trump had bitten the bullet and implemented preventative measures just a week earlier than March 15. Instead, by June, Trump tried to bury the literal bodies altogether and abandon testing.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please,” Trump told his mostly mask-less supporters at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma — the very same one where Herman Cain likely contracted covid and later died.
Trump’s careless disregard for public health precautions led to him contracting the virus in late September. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed that Trump tested positive on the same day as the White House’s gloating superspreader event in honor of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump was already experiencing symptoms and should’ve quarantined for 10 days, but visibly unwell, he still attended the first screaming match debate with Biden. At least 11 covid cases were linked to that event, including Trump’s debate prepper Chris Christie, who was hospitalized. Fortunately, Trump failed to spread the virus to his political opponent, but he kept his condition secret for days. When close aide Hope Hicks tested positive, he announced he and First Lady Melania Trump were entering quarantine, implying that Hicks had exposed them to the virus. He even attempted to scapegoat military personnel and law enforcement for infecting Hicks and other members of White House staff.
Biden’s public health record shouldn’t be taken for granted
The damage continued even after Trump left office. Arguably, his presidency’s one decent achievement was the swift production of a covid vaccine almost a year earlier than originally estimated. Of course, even while pushing Operation Warp Speed, Trump downplayed the need for a vaccine. He said in May 2020, “We think we’re going to have a vaccine in the pretty near future … but if we don’t, we’re going to be like so many other cases where you had a problem come in, it’ll go away at some point, it’ll go away.” That was obviously nonsense, and he knew it.
Trump blocked Biden’s transition team from preparing for the transfer of power while attempting to remain in office illegally. This meant that Biden had to play catch up regarding the vaccine rollout. Biden still stuck with his ambitious goal of administering 100 million doses of the vaccine within his first 100 days in office. He achieved this in only 58 days despite a MAGA disinformation campaign against the vaccine.
Biden has been criticized for prematurely declaring victory over the pandemic in May 2021, when the CDC announced that fully vaccinated people didn’t need to wear face masks in most settings. However, there’s no evidence that Biden was misleading the public for short-term political gain. The delta variant would become the dominant covid strain by the end of summer, and vaccinated people were able to spread it. Thus, mask mandates soon returned in many states. This sudden backslide when most Americans believed they had finally put the pandemic behind them dealt a permanent blow to Biden’s approval ratings.
The worst thing you could say about Biden’s handling of the pandemic, though, is that he didn’t foresee how many Americans would simply refuse the vaccine, stalling the vaccination rollout. Trump obviously didn’t help this process. He wouldn’t admit at first that he had been vaccinated, feeding the dangerous narrative that “natural immunity” from previous exposure was just as effective. Studies have shown that his own supporters have suffered the most from vaccine refusal. Researchers found in 2023 that “the excess [covid-related] death rate among Republican voters was 43 percent higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters” after the vaccine was released.
During an interview last year with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump admitted that he doesn’t like to talk about the vaccine “because, as a Republican, it’s not a great thing to talk about.” Trump was booed at a 2021 rally in Alabama when he suggested that supporters take the vaccine. He apparently can convince his fans that the 2020 election was stolen, but can’t persuade them that the covid vaccine is safe and won’t permanently alter their DNA. His powers can only be used for evil.
A research panel examined Trump’s covid policies in 2021 and concluded that the US could’ve avoided 40 percent of all pandemic deaths if the bleach guy wasn’t in charge the year before. Even now, his anti-science legacy endures as his supporters reject the simplest method of protecting themselves from the virus. Biden and Democrats should relentlessly remind voters how many lives were ruined in 2020 because Donald Trump was president
