His eagerness for remedies no doubt reflects a sincere desire to deliver Americans from the nightmare of lockdowns, fear for loved ones and atmosphere of national trauma.
It’s holding out the promise of hope and optimism to shift attention from the reality of alarming rises in infections, a building economic crisis, a shortage of ventilators, the federal government’s botched coronavirus testing roll-out, and revelations that doctors were told to use bandanas as masks.
For the last two days, Trump’s breakthrough announcement was later revealed to be far less dramatic than its initial billing by an official in his own administration. But in the permanent coronavirus campaign, Trump has his soundbite and conservative media has a new peg for evening shows puffing his leadership.
On Thursday, Trump celebrated his own announcement that he had torn down red tape and that several anti-virus therapies used to treat other conditions were now or shortly will deployed in the battle against Covid-19.
“I think it could be a game changer, and maybe not, and maybe not. But, I think it could be, based on what I see, it could be a game changer. Very powerful — they’re very powerful,” Trump said.
Trump is doing what presidents should do: Pressing officials hard to get results more quickly. His search for treatments does him credit and shows a President willing to experiment, but there’s no doubt he overhyped the immediate prospects for the drug.
He appeared to ignore the rigorous standards of science to assess drugs that have in some cases had promising results but are nowhere near proven to be effective in eradicating coronavirus. It’s not yet clear whether heavy doses of the drugs in question could cause side effects.
And with his premature optimism, Trump appeared to lean heavily to the wrong side of the lesson Hahn learned as an oncologist: “What’s also important is not to provide false hope, but to provide hope.”
‘We’re not a shipping clerk’
But bizarrely, on Thursday, he dug in and said such a World War II-style home front might not be needed, even as governors and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pleaded with him to flip the switch.
“Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work, and they are doing a lot of this work. The federal government’s not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping. You know, we’re not a shipping clerk,” Trump said. “We’ll help out, and we’ll help out wherever we can.”
His comments suggested a growing theme in the coronavirus fight — a gulf between the White House’s frequent self-praise for its efforts and the situation in hospitals.
“On the front line people are terrified,” said Megan Ranney, a physician at Lifespan/Brown University.
“We can’t get the masks and other protective gears that we need. We are being told by the CDC to reuse masks for every patient,” Ranney told CNN.
The buck didn’t stop in the White House briefing, however. Pence praised Trump’s leadership in securing “incredible progress” to get industrial masks manufactured for health care workers.
Trump wasn’t willing to address the conflict between the sunny White House view and the terrible choices facing doctors.
“I cannot explain the gap, I’m hearing very good things on the ground,” the President said.
A strategy to spare Trump from blame
In recent days, the President and aides have made obvious efforts to bury Trump’s long history of skepticism that the novel coronavirus was a threat to the United States.
On Wednesday, he said he’d always known a disease he dismissed as less significant than the flu was actually a pandemic.
On Thursday, the President suggested that no one could have expected a pandemic to erupt — even though officials in the previous administration, and his administration and foreign policy experts have long worried about such an emergency.
“This was something that happened that was — some people would say an act of God. I don’t view it as an act of God — I would view it as something that just surprised the whole world,” the President said.
His critics would argue that given months of warning from events in China his White House should have been far more prepared — especially when it comes to a shortage of tests kits that still prevents public health chiefs from drawing up a full understanding of the scale of the pandemic in the US.
The administration’s emerging political strategy to evade blame is also evident in a coordinated White House and conservative media effort to saddle China with all the blame for the pandemic.
There are serious questions to be asked about the transparency of the Chinese government in Beijing over the emergence of the virus late last year. But both Beijing and Washington are also playing a low political game in blaming one another for deficiencies in each nation’s fight against the virus. And Trump has certainly changed his tune — for weeks he was praising his “friend” Chinese President Xi Jinping — even as the media and his political opponents were urging him to be ready for the disease to hit US soil.
“I spoke with President Xi and they’re working very, very hard and I think it’s going to all work out fine,” Trump said on February 11.
On Thursday, the President was squarely blaming China for allowing the pandemic to spread.
“It could have been stopped right where it came from, China, if we would have known about it,” Trump said. “But now, the whole world, almost, is inflicted with this horrible — with this horrible virus, and it’s too bad.”