Donald Trump: A Cumpulsive Liar Who Needs To Stop Talking, Because His Constant Lies Are Costing Lives

Donald Trump is a compulsive and entirely self-seving liar, with no regard for the consequences of his mendacity for the health and well-being of the US population to whom he is answerable. Consider the following:

1. At today's White House press conference (1 April 2020) Mr Trump said “After a month or so, I think once this passes, we’re not going to have to be hopefully worried too much about the virus,”

This is utter madness and Mr Trump certainly has been told this by his medical and scientific advisors.  Unless a majority of Americans have (a) been infected and (b) acquired immunity, any relaxation of controls on movement will cause the disease to spike once again.

We are still well below 1000 reported cases per million population in the US, the limited data available globally suggests that asymptomatic individuals represent about half of all Covid-19 infections, and true herd immunity requires at least c. 60% of the population (600,000 per million people) to have immunity via infection.  In other words, we are a long long way from immunity even assuming immunity from this virus is durable (something we don't know, and remember the common cold is a corona virus).

2.  Also today, Trump tried once again to deflect blame for the country’s slow start in testing, saying he “inherited a very broken system.”  This is a lie.  The fact is there was a test available in Germany in January of this year, widely adopted via the WHO, that has formed the basis for successful testing in many other countries.  We simply chose not to use a proven standard.  Any systemic failures were failures made this year, poor choices perhaps, but they belong to the current Administration.

3. Again today, Trump defended holding off on a national lockdown by stating Florida doesn’t “have thousands of people who are positive.”  Florida, in fact has almost 8,000 confirmed cases at time of writing.  This is the kind of in-your-face lie that autocrats love to tell. Flagrant lying of this kind speaks volumes for the sense of impunity Mr Trump likely feels, and explains his willingless to lie recklessly.

4. And this from live commentary via The Guardian on today's press conference: Trump is now back to addressing the coronavirus crisis. “Nobody could’ve known a thing like this would happen,” he said, speaking of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In fact, the US intelligence community, public health experts and officials in Trump’s own administration had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic, including specific warnings about a coronavirus outbreak.  I imagine John Bolton could offer insights if invited to testify to Congress.

When this strain of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was identified in Wuhan, China in early January, health experts immediately cautioned that it could turn into a global health crisis. US agencies were tracking the spread of the virus in China and then other countries, and warned that Chinese officials were minimising the impact (in fact there are press reports from Hong Kong suggesting that Beijing was aware in December 2019 of the outbreak but said nothing. If true that should damn Xi Jinping, but it cannot exonerate Mr Trump).

“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were – they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” an unnamed government official told the Washington Post last week. “The system was blinking red.”

An October 2019 draft report by the Department of Health and Human Services, obtained by the New York Times: “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed,” the Times reported.  This was the "Crimson Contagion" exercise modelling a viral epidemic originating in China, run by the DHHS from January to August last year (see the story here:  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html).

5.  "Anyone who wants a test can have one."  Donald Trump, March 6th 2020.  This fantasist claim remains untrue today, April 1st.  I have indirect personal knowledge of this since a family member in Boston was today deemed presumptively positive for Covid 19 yet could not be tested due to a shortage of test kits.

It is impossible to control an epidemic without knowing who is infected.  For example, if we relax controls on movement and public gathering we will rekindle the spread of the virus, unless we can do so based on data.

The US and South Korea registered their first cases of Covid-19 one day apart.  Within a week South Korea was testing at least 10,000 people per day while we never established adequate capacity and sat on our hands for weeks.  This is purely a matter of administrative incompetence and willful denial of scientific truth.

6. “We have it totally under control.  It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he said. “It’s going to be just fine.”  This was Trump on 22nd January, two days after the first formally diagnosed US case and three days after the first South Korean case.  The data today plainly shows we do not have the virus under control despite ample warnings, whereas South Korea is managing well for now.  See point 5 above.

7.  The lies and delusions kept on coming.  In late February we had the following barrage of falsehoods: “We had 12 [cases], at one point. And now they’ve gotten very much better. Many of them are fully recovered,” he told the media on 23 February.

The following day, he tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”

Quite why Mr Trump would persist in such flagrant lying is anyone's guess and I don't intend to speculate.  The facts of his many lies are plain matters of record and speak for themselves.

8.  Trump has continued to offer bogus, misleading and outright untrue claims about treatment and vaccines.  For example, he has often asserted without a shred of evidence that warm weather will suppress the corona virus (mortality rates in the Philippines and Indonesia show this groundless lie for what it is), that chloroquine family drugs are a treatment (there is no evidence to support this and there are numerous news reports of people becoming ill or dying from self-treatment with chloroquine-based compounds) and any vaccine is many months or even years away at best.  Mr Trump's lies have been repeated frequently over the past two months so I don't see the need to supply a reference date.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump continues to claim he is doing a great job (grading himself a "10" at a recent press briefing) and that his administration is working wonders.  This is despite admitting today that the federal stockpile of personal protective equipment is nearly empty. “It is,” he said. “Because we’re sending it directly to hospitals.”

Yet for weeks, state governors of both major parties, congressional leaders and former vice president Biden have been demanding Trump use the Defense Production Act of 1950 to mobilise national resources and coordinate their allocation.  The fact that our stockpile of essential equipment is essentially exhausted is a direct consequence of Mr Trump's weeks of inaction (and sales of critical materials overseas).  Private sector initiatives are commendable (and there have been many of them) but they still leave states in effect bidding against each other to save lives, and only commit manufacturing capacity firms choose to commit, rather than what they possess.  Only the federal government can manage these conflicts and allocate resources based on need. 

There is no lack of desire in the US to do the right thing and a great deal of selfless courage and altruistic heroism.  What we do lack is leadership.  Donald Trump loves to give pejorative nicknames to his political foes, and in times of plenty that's worth a chuckle and we can all get by.  But when things get serious (and on April 1st over 1000 Americans have died from coronavirus, more in a 24-hour period than any country on earth so far in this pandemic), the clowning has to stop.

Unfortunately for us, Mr Trump only knows how to lie, whether in his many business ventures that ended in bankruptcy, in his clandestine payoffs to paramours and porn stars, in his tawdry tax fiddles to shave a few dollars in New York tax bills, or by his outlandish claims to the electorate (who remembers "I'll replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better that covers more people." or, "I'll pay off the federal budget deficit within 8 years"?)

We cannot afford more self-interested posturing from Lying Don (a nickname he deserves given his predilection for insulting opponents via nicknames).  He has to stop using daily briefings as photo-ops and campaign events, and actually start to function as an effective leader or, (as I fear such a transformation is beyond Mr Trump, given his lifelong record of incompetence), get out of the way and leave the task of saving American lives to someone who knows how to manage in a crisis, and how to tell us the unvarnished truth instead of a ceaseless torrent of lies.