[The Soup Nazi]

(cont'd)

As the virus surged around the country, millions of Americans upended their lives and adopted new habits to protect one another. All the while, the President and his team pursued a different path. Declining to wear a mask or follow basic social-distancing guidance, Trump tweeted about “liberating” states and promoted discredited therapies. Overwhelmed by the task of fighting the virus, he pulled from the playbook of tobacco companies and climate-change deniers, casting doubt on the statistics. The rise in cases reflected only increased testing; the number of deaths had been doctored; the virus’s lethality had been overstated—as his dodges piled up, it became clear that he had no interest in grappling with the reality of hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Atlas, a neuroradiologist without training in epidemiology or infectious diseases, came to the White House at the end of the summer, having spent much of the year offering pandemic commentary on Fox News. He gained regular access to Trump and began wielding greater influence over the Administration’s coronavirus strategy. Atlas has repeatedly voiced skepticism of fundamental public-health principles, such as testing, mask-wearing, and social distancing. (“Everything he says is false,” Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., has said.) Fauci and Deborah Birx, the coronavirus-response coördinator, have confronted him about many of his unfounded claims—among them that parts of the country, including New York City, are approaching fifty-per-cent immunity. But they have been largely sidelined. Trump no longer regularly meets with the White House coronavirus task force; Atlas is now the President’s primary health adviser.

Earlier this month, many wondered whether the President’s own infection might pop the bubble. (Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 illness seemed to chasten him.) But Republican leaders, having maintained for months that concern about the virus is a form of cowardice, responded by ascending to new levels of reality distortion. Some tried to spin the President’s infection as a joke: Marsha Blackburn, a senator from Tennessee, tweeted that “President Trump has once again defeated China” along with a video, set to dramatic music, of Trump maskless at the White House. Nearly two dozen people in Trump’s immediate circle had been infected. Still, Mike Pence’s team requested that no plexiglass barrier be placed between him and Kamala Harris at the Vice-Presidential debate. (“If Senator Harris wants to use a fortress around herself, have at it,” Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, said; the Commission on Presidential Debates decided that the plexiglass would stay.) Just eleven days after testing positive for the coronavirus, Trump told attendees at a campaign rally in Florida that he was now immune and threatened to descend from the stage to “kiss the guys and the beautiful women and everybody.”

To watch all this, as a physician, is to struggle with my own disbelief. Trump and his team demand that doctors and hospitals perform heroic acrobatics to save lives and that scientists race to develop a coronavirus vaccine at unprecedented speed, while at the same time displaying a wanton disregard for medical science. Their reckless abdication of duty depends on others faithfully performing theirs.


A fine line separates playing down a risk from encouraging the rush toward danger. Republicans have sought to straddle that line and have sometimes strayed over it. “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ ” Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, said, in March, on Fox News. “Don’t let it dominate your life,” Trump tells his followers, before bringing thousands of them together in close quarters. According to the Republican leadership, real patriots risk their lives and the lives of others; liberty is walking into a store without a mask; power is touring a hospital without one—as Pence did, at the Mayo Clinic, in April—or refusing to wear one at a Presidential debate, as Trump’s family did, at the Cleveland Clinic, even after a doctor asked them to. Now months of misinformation under the guise of reassurance threaten to bleed into an outright embrace of infection.

Is this bravado a put-on? At times, it has seemed purely cynical—a show of strength from behind a fortified wall. Throughout the pandemic, Trump has argued that we should perform fewer tests—the cases they uncover make us “look bad,” he’s said—even as he’s relied on regular testing for himself and his staff. A recent poll found that half of Republicans believe that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment against COVID-19—and yet the President, when hospitalized, chose not to take the drug himself, even though he had touted it as a “miracle” that was possibly among the “biggest game changers in the history of medicine.”

In other ways, though, Trump and those around him seem to have internalized their rhetoric. To contemplate the lack of screenings, distancing, and masks inside the White House, or to see photographs of the handshakes, hugs, and kisses at the superspreading Supreme Court announcement in the Rose Garden, is to conclude that Trump’s rejection of science is not just a façade meant to project a contorted conception of strength and liberty. His team’s mockery of those concerned about the virus may be wrongheaded, but it isn’t entirely empty; they take few measures to avoid it themselves. Believing their own alternative facts, top Administration officials accuse government scientists of “sedition.” Atlas sends out anti-mask tweets—“masks work? NO”—violating Twitter’s rules on misinformation. The White House threatens to withhold COVID-19 relief funds from liberal, “anarchist” cities. Approvingly, the Administration cites a pandemic strategy that will endanger the lives of millions of Americans. “It’s going away,” Trump promises, at the final Presidential debate, during a viral surge. “We have to open our country.”


Will people follow Trump down this path? Polls suggest that they won’t. More than two-thirds of Americans say that they have little or no trust in the information the President shares about COVID-19 and disapprove of his handling of the pandemic. Only nineteen per cent say that they will trust Trump if he tells them that a new coronavirus vaccine is safe; less than half of Republicans trust him on that question. Americans’ faith in the federal government’s approach is as low as it’s ever been. In a recent CNN poll, Biden, whom the President mocks for wearing a mask, has a sixteen-point advantage over the President—the most lopsided poll this close to an election in the twenty-first century. A cartoonish and destructive Presidency could soon come to an end. If it doesn’t, it’s easy to imagine how the Administration could shift further from an unhelpful stance to an actively harmful one—undermining states’ efforts to keep people safe and demanding, as proof of political fealty, the adoption of unproved or disproved strategies and therapies.

The U.S. is now entering what seems to be a new wave of infection; over the past week, the country saw, on average, more than sixty thousand new cases a day. In many states, COVID-19 wards are filling up again, and some places are seeing record-high hospitalizations; the Midwest is experiencing its largest growth in cases since the start of the pandemic. According to some models, the U.S. could experience nearly four hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths before the next President is sworn in. Despite all this, Trump would likely interpret reëlection as a validation of his approach. We could find ourselves living even more deeply in two incompatible worlds: a medical world, in which doctors, hospitals, scientists, and public-health professionals continue doing their best to grapple with the virus, and a political one, in which wishful thinking and pseudoscience rule. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We could move, together, into a single, fact-based world—one in which we confront reality and work to improve it.


Dhruv Khullar is a physician and writer in New York City.