Four Die-Hard Loyalists Are Enabling Trump's Apocalyptic Coronavirus
Response
By James Risen, The Intercept
10 May 20
The Four Horsemen of the Pandemic are rampaging through Washington. Their
names are Kushner, Miller, Pompeo, and Barr.
They are fulfilling Donald Trump's darkest desires to twist the Covid-19
pandemic into a culture war, while also looking for ways to exploit the
nation's greatest public health crisis in a century to foment hoaxes and
conspiracy theories and punish Trump's enemies.
Meanwhile, they are ignoring the actual pandemic. Trump and his lackeys have
decided to let America burn.
They have wasted the time the American people gave them to come to grips
with Covid-19. It was precious time granted by people who, in overwhelming
numbers, complied with state-level stay-at-home orders for two months so the
government could come up with a serious national strategy to address the
health crisis and its economic fallout.
But Trump has betrayed that sacrifice by failing to develop any coherent
plan at all. He has surrendered to the virus, even as the American death
toll heads rapidly toward 100,000.
He has instead spent his time sitting in the White House watching cable
news, braying at his critics on Twitter, and summarily firing anyone in the
federal government who tries to actually take action to prevent the pandemic
from becoming even worse. The latest victim is Dr. Rick Bright, who filed a
whistleblower complaint on Tuesday after he was ousted from his position as
director of the government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development
Authority. Bright's sin? He refused to get on board with the Trump
administration's incoherent response to the virus, notably its dangerous and
ill-informed efforts to push hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, as a
Covid-19 treatment just because Trump had called it a miracle cure.
While professionals like Bright are pushed aside, Trump has turned to the
usual suspects to do his bidding.
Jared Kushner, his pale, thin-lipped son-in-law, has gone from creating
havoc in the Middle East, where he was supposedly in charge of developing
Trump's "policy" for the region, to creating havoc in the federal response
to Covid-19, thanks to his role running a backdoor coronavirus task force
rife with incompetence and political favoritism. (The Trump White House has
a front-door ad-hoc task force, run by Vice President Mike Pence, but Trump
shut down the professional pandemic team at the National Security Council in
2018.)
Kushner's most consequential and deadliest contribution to the government's
response came early in the crisis, when he convinced Trump that the press
was overhyping the threat. That appealed to Trump's natural inclination to
call Covid-19 a media-invented hoax, especially as he started facing
criticism for failing to address shortages of tests and other urgently
needed medical equipment, including protective gear for nurses and doctors.
Trump's failure to take any action during the pandemic's critical early days
allowed the virus to become embedded in the United States.
Naturally, Kushner has now declared victory, even as Covid-19 expands its
fatal reach across the nation. "We're on the other side of the medical
aspect of this," Kushner told Fox News last week. "We've achieved all the
different milestones that are needed. The federal government rose to the
challenge, and this is a great success story."
Stephen Miller, a young man with an endless forehead who serves as Trump's
master of the dark arts of xenophobia and nationalism, has inserted himself
into the Covid-19 crisis as well, convincing the president to sign an
executive order severely restricting immigration during the pandemic. Of
course, Miller wants the temporary order to lead to the permanent, draconian
crackdown on immigration he has long wished for. Miller has pushed through
dozens of smaller changes in immigration policies and procedures during the
pandemic, which may also lead to permanent changes.
Miller's long-term anti-immigrant obsession has already had a devastating
impact on the nation's ability to deal with the pandemic. Trump has gutted
the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is supposed to
coordinate America's disaster response, while a growing share of funding for
its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, has been
shifted to immigration and border control.
Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state with a body like a neighborhood bowling
league champion, is helping Trump foment conspiracy theories about the
origins of Covid-19. Pompeo has been pushing the notion that the virus was
manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. By contrast, the consensus among most
scientists, public health officials, and intelligence analysts throughout
the world is that the virus reached humans naturally through contact in a
Chinese wet market.
While the exact origins of the virus don't matter to most Americans now
struggling to deal with Covid-19, Pompeo's goal in pushing this so-called
Wuhan lab theory is to make Trump feel better about his own failed handling
of the crisis. It also can be weaponized to convince Trump's die-hard base
that the government's botched handling of the pandemic is not Trump's fault.
Over the last few days, Pompeo has offered a series of confused statements
about the issue, probably because Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top
infectious disease professional, has repeatedly and publicly pushed back,
saying that the scientific evidence shows that the virus is not man-made.
Over the weekend, Pompeo claimed there was strong evidence that the virus
originated in a Chinese lab. On Wednesday, he said he wasn't certain, but
added that there is "significant evidence" that the virus came from a
Chinese laboratory.
His jumbled statements show that Pompeo is trying to walk a tightrope
between the experts and Trump, who has a long-standing addiction to
conspiracy theories.
In the process, Pompeo has managed to pointlessly anger China - just one
aspect of a broader Trump-Pompeo renunciation of international cooperation
on Covid-19. Earlier this week, the Trump administration refused to join a
virtual summit of world leaders who pledged to join forces to develop
vaccines and treatments.
Attorney General William Barr, Trump's Tom Hagen, has also joined the
president's Covid-19 show. Barr is now threatening to turn the Justice
Department against the state governors who, in the absence of national
leadership, have done the most to grapple with the pandemic. In the process,
Barr is aligning himself with the ugliest strain of an emerging American
culture war. Trump has repeatedly tweeted his opposition to state
stay-at-home orders, while showing support for protests by armed
right-wingers at several state capitols, who have demanded that the
stay-at-home orders be lifted. In another demonstration of Barr's political
fealty to Trump, the attorney general is now threatening lawsuits against
states with strict stay-at-home orders, complaining that they infringe of
people's civil liberties.
But Barr's claim to be a champion of civil liberties was undermined by his
actions just weeks earlier, when the administration tried to empower the
attorney general to ask federal judges to freeze court proceedings during a
national emergency. While the Democratic-controlled House will almost
certainly not vote for the administration proposal, if it did become law it
could mean that anyone arrested could be held without charge until the
crisis ends.
For Trump and his flunkies, Covid-19 has been everything but a public health
crisis. As if to underline that point, Trump said earlier this week that
Pence's coronavirus task force would soon be winding down. He quickly
changed course on that, saying that the task force will remain active but
will focus on reopening the economy. In other words, it will be an adjunct
to Trump's reelection campaign.