"It Affects Virtually Nobody": The Three Weeks of Denial Leading Up To Trump's Diagnosis
I was looking for a compilation of tRump's "greatest hits" of Covid denial and stumbled across this on Mother Jones.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/trump-covid-timeline/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=naytev&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR1nesd4ib2DHfSdY2hB5fpQ1RZ2fmfeNrwqYdQmrW768ebea0kP5uAqgV0
President Donald Trump leaves the White House to go to Walter Reed Military Medical Center on October 2.Saul Loeb/Getty
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Even by the warped standards of the Trump era, the past few weeks have been an unusually exhausting blur, culminating in the shocking yet not entirely surprising news that the president has COVID-19. In case you’re trying to recall (or managed to forget), here’s how those three weeks of ongoing denial and dark hints of political chaos unfolded:
September 13: President Donald Trump holds an indoor campaign rally near Las Vegas, ignoring a state order limiting gatherings to 50 people. • Asked if he’s worried about exposure to the virus at an indoor rally, Trump says, “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away. And so I’m not at all concerned.”
September 15: Trump tells Fox & Friends that a vaccine will be approved “in a matter of weeks.” • At an ABC News town hall, asked why he’d downplayed the pandemic, Trump replies, “In many ways I up-played it in terms of action.” He says again that, even without a vaccine, the coronavirus will go away. “You’ll develop herd—like a herd mentality,” he says.
September 16: Attorney General William Barr says pandemic lockdowns and stay-at-home orders are the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history” since slavery. • Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo goes on medical leave after he claims that a “resistance unit” inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to undermine the president. • Trump claims that Democratic states are to blame for coronavirus death rates: “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.” • Asked about CDC Director Robert Redfield’s comments that a vaccine wouldn’t be widely available before 2021, Trump insists 100 million doses will be available by the end of the year and says the CDC head “made a mistake.” • Joe Biden asks the president to prove that vaccine development is not being politicized. “I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump,” he says.
September 17: The New York Times reports that HHS staff, not CDC scientists, wrote the agency’s recent recommendation that asymptomatic people with possible coronavirus exposure do not need to be tested. • Just over half of Americans surveyed say they would get a COVID-19 vaccine if it were available. • Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to Pence who worked on the COVID task force, calls out Trump’s “flat-out disregard for human life” and endorses Biden. She says the president saw the coronavirus as positive because he would no longer have to shake hands with “disgusting people.”
September 18: The CDC backtracks, again recommending testing for asymptomatic people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus. • For the first time, the agency posts information about the transmission of the coronavirus via droplets that can travel more than 6 feet. • Due to the coronavirus, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe says it’s cutting the number of monitors it will send to observe the November election from 500 to 30.
September 21: The CDC removes the new information about airborne transmission from its site, saying it had been “posted in error.” • Johnson & Johnson begins Phase 3 trials of a vaccine. • Trump tells Fox and Friends, “We’ve done a phenomenal job…On public relations, I give myself a D. On the job itself, we take an A+.” • At a rally in Ohio, Trump downplays the risks of COVID-19: “Now we know it affects elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects. That’s it…Take your hat off to the young because they have a hell of an immune system, but it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing.”
September 22: The Washington Post reports that $1 billion in funding directed to the Pentagon to buy medical equipment was mostly spent on military gear. • The US death toll passes 200,000, which represents more Americans dying in any discrete mass casualty event besides the Civil War, World War II, and the 1918 flu pandemic. • Outside the White House, a reporter asks Trump, “Why haven’t you said anything about the US hitting 200,000 deaths from COVID?” Trump ignores the question, but when he’s asked again about the milestone, he says, “Well, I think it’s a shame. I think if we didn’t do it properly and do it right, you’d have two and a half million deaths.