When the President Became a Public Health Hazard

How America Failed the COVID Test

Welcome to Citizen Jack’s Mud Creek Chronicles. If you are new to my blog, thank you for joining us. For the past week or so I’ve been writing about the Pandemic that ravaged the world starting in 2019. In my 2022 book, The Trump Files, I reported on COVID-19 in detail. Here, I will take us back to that period for a shared experience and explore what conclusions we can draw to prepare for another pandemic. Another essay will follow this one to develop that idea.

I’ve examined the unresolved origins of COVID-19, weighing evidence for both natural spillover from bats and a possible laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while highlighting the scientific, political, and international complexities that continue to fuel debate.

In this essay, I examine the historic leadership during the pandemic years. President Trump ignored early COVID-19 warnings, downplayed the threat, and politicized public health messaging, undermining trust and delaying testing. His administration weakened CDC capacity and interfered with scientific advice. Despite rapid vaccine development, leadership failures contributed to over 400,000 deaths, highlighting the importance of truthful communication, evidence-based decisions, and prioritizing human life over politics

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Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

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On January 28, 2020, Donald Trump received a warning that should have changed the course of his presidency.

In the Oval Office, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump that the coronavirus outbreak in China would be the greatest national-security threat he would face as president. Matt Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who had reported on the SARS epidemic while a journalist in China, was even more explicit. The new virus, he was warned, could be as serious as the influenza pandemic of 1918.

The question is what he did with the warning.

In The Trump Files, I argued that what followed was not simply a public-health disaster. It was a failure of presidential leadership. Now that Trump has returned to the White House, the question deserves another look.

Did Donald Trump’s actions contribute to America’s failed response to COVID-19?

The evidence says yes.

But the story is more complicated—and more important—than simply one man.

The Government Knew

The United States was not taken completely by surprise. Scientists and national-security officials understood early that the outbreak in China could become an extraordinary international emergency. By January 2020, Trump’s advisers were telling him that the virus spread efficiently between people, including from people who showed no symptoms.

In The Trump Files, I wrote that from that moment forward, Americans were put at risk because the president did not heed those warnings and instead repeatedly minimized the threat and interfered with the CDC. Earlier warning signs also appeared in the government’s preparedness structure. The Trump-COVID timeline (Figure 1) notes that the White House pandemic-response operation was dismantled in 2018 and that CDC personnel in China’s disease-control system were eliminated in 2019. None of those decisions caused COVID-19.

But they weakened defenses that become indispensable when a new infectious disease suddenly appears.

Then came the public statements.

On January 21, Trump said the situation was under control. Through February, he repeatedly predicted that case numbers would decline. Yet the virus was moving invisibly through communities. That gap between what government officials knew and what the president told the American people became a defining characteristic of the crisis.

Truth Is a Public-Health Intervention

While researching The Trump Files, I went back to the 1918 influenza pandemic. Historian John Barry (author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History) identified a lesson that seems almost embarrassingly simple: Governments have to tell people the truth. During an epidemic, citizens make decisions based on what authorities tell them. They decide whether to avoid a crowd, close a business, send a child to school, wear a mask, visit a grandparent, or stay home.

When official information is contradictory or politically manipulated, trust evaporates. That is precisely what happened during COVID-19. Federal, state, and local governments issued conflicting messages. Some states imposed restrictions while others raced to reopen. Public-health recommendations became markers of political identity.

Trump intensified the problem. Instead of consistently placing scientists before the public, he increasingly made himself the government’s principal COVID communicator. The result was disastrous.

What Happened to the CDC?

Before COVID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had a worldwide reputation for investigating infectious diseases. During 2020, that reputation suffered badly. Some of the wounds were self-inflicted. The CDC’s initial COVID test kits had serious problems, contributing to the country’s disastrous delay in widespread testing.

But another problem came from the White House. In The Trump Files, I described reports that White House officials interfered with CDC decision-making and communication. Experienced scientists were marginalized, and CDC personnel described struggling to protect scientific advice from political interference.

Consider what happened to Dr. Nancy Messonnier. Nancy Ellen Messonnier is an American physician, currently serving as dean of the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since September 2022.

On February 25, 2020, while she was a chief scientist at the CDC, Messonnier publicly warned Americans that community transmission was coming and that disruption to everyday life could be severe. The CDC urged families, businesses, and schools to prepare.

It was exactly what a public-health agency should have been doing. The warning alarmed financial markets—and infuriated the White House. Messonnier soon disappeared from the government’s public briefings. Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus task force and became the dominant voice at televised briefings.

Scientists could still appear. Dr. Anthony Fauci worked alongside several key scientists and public health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, including Dr. Deborah Birx, an immunologist and response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Fauci and Birx served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force and often appeared with Trump and others, especially at media news conferences.

But increasingly the task force appeared in a political theater controlled by the president.

Testing Was Another Warning

The United States also stumbled badly on testing. Other countries demonstrated that aggressive testing, isolation, and contact tracing could slow transmission. South Korea, for example, rapidly established a testing-and-tracking system, and soon flattened the curve of cases. The United States struggled to make tests widely available.

I experienced this personally. In the summer of 2020, I repeatedly tried to get a COVID test in Georgia. One clinic had run out of kits. Eventually, I found a test almost by accident because several appointments had been canceled. Then I was told I might wait about ten days for a result. A ten-day-old COVID result was virtually useless for effective contact tracing. That small experience illustrated the larger national problem.

America had extraordinary biomedical expertise but lacked an efficient public-health system that could quickly turn scientific knowledge into action.

Trump Did One Very Important Thing Right

Any fair evaluation should acknowledge an important success of the Trump administration:

Operation Warp Speed.

The federal government used money, purchasing commitments, and coordination to accelerate vaccine development and manufacturing through Operation Warp Speed. But even this achievement depended upon scientific investments made long before Trump became president. As I explained in The Trump Files, decades of federally funded NIH and university research, along with the tireless work of scientists, laid the groundwork for the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Trump had nothing to do with this.

That distinction matters.

The American scientific establishment performed an astonishing feat. Our political system performed much less well.

More Than 400,000 Dead

Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020. By the time he left office in January 2021, the United States had recorded more than 24 million COVID cases and more than 406,000 reported deaths, figures I documented in The Trump Files.

No president could have prevented all of them. COVID-19 was a highly transmissible new virus. Every country struggled. Scientists learned about transmission, treatment, and prevention as the pandemic unfolded.

But uncertainty makes competent leadership more important, not less. A president facing an unknown threat has several essential responsibilities: seek the best evidence, tell the public what is known and unknown, protect scientific institutions from political pressure, coordinate government action, and change course when the evidence changes.

Too often, Trump did the opposite. He minimized danger. He personalized public-health policy. And he undermined experts. He encouraged states to reopen while transmission remained widespread. Masks became political symbols rather than ordinary public-health tools. The failure was therefore larger than one missed policy. It was a failure of the relationship between science and democratic leadership.

Figure 2 compares how science worked to how leadership failed. The table data came from discussions in The Trump Files about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scientists cannot govern a democracy. Nor should they. But elected leaders cannot manufacture scientific reality. The virus does not care about poll numbers, political rallies, ideological loyalty, or the next election. SARS-CoV-2 operated according to biology. America’s tragedy was that its president too often acted as though biology could be negotiated.

COVID-19 tested the United States. Our scientists performed remarkably. Our nurses, physicians, teachers, and other essential workers responded with extraordinary dedication.

And our government produced vaccines in record time.

But presidential leadership failed a more basic test: tell people the truth, trust the evidence, and put the protection of human life ahead of politics. We should remember that failure for a simple reason.

There will be another test.