And so on May 11 Trump proclaimed victory over the coronavirus. He announced, baselessly, that America led the world in testing. Two months of quarantine, and the economic collapse that Trump had long feared as the only true threat to his presidency, resulted in a rejection of the new reality among Trump’s constituencies so pronounced that reopening prematurely began in Georgia. “We have met the moment and we have prevailed,” Trump said in the Rose Garden. “Americans do whatever it takes to find solutions, pioneer breakthroughs, and harness the energies we need to achieve a total victory.” It was the pandemic equivalent of Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln, announcing major combat operations against COVID-19 had ended. At least 260,000 more Americans would die from coronavirus in 2020.
Narratively Trump had come full circle. His first public response to the outbreak had been to deny the novel coronavirus was anything more than a flu. “We’ve never closed down the country for the flu,” he told Fox as late as March 24, less than a week after he privately told Bob Woodward, “I always wanted to play it down,” since the coronavirus was “deadly stuff.” Fox News whipsawed from framing the coronavirus as little more than Democratic hysteria to a deadly serious challenge that only Donald Trump could overcome. A right-wing media and social-media infrastructure reconciled the conflicting narratives through voicing contempt at liberal and scientific concerns over the spread of the virus. Trump, through Pence, assembled a task force including scientists; their expertise and independence only became targets of MAGA’s ire. Its true function was to make Trump seem as if he was taking action against the virus after his inaction had all but ensured disaster. On May 3, a week before he declared victory and heralded a rapid reopening, the president assured the country that at worst, American deaths would total 100,000. The United States reached that total on May 27, and likely passed it even earlier. By mid-June, the country continued to average 24,000 new coronavirus cases daily, due in part to a rise in cases from reopened states, compared to 4,000 in the European Union. Trump himself caught the virus in late September, after attending White House meetings honoring Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and Gold Star families. He received first-rate treatment unavailable to the general public, as well as a sycophantic portrayal of his strength from physicians at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Soon after, in echoes of Bush and the Iraq insurgency, Trump insisted that “we’re rounding the corner” on confronting the virus he claimed in May to have defeated. By late November, the U.S. averaged 164,687 new cases daily. December 9 was the first day, but not the last, to exceed the 9/11 death toll.
Trump’s wartime metaphor made sense, but not for the reason he had thought. Coronavirus was the public health equivalent of the War on Terror. The Bush administration had refused to consider that America’s chosen role as global policeman had left it vulnerable to violent religious fanatics who refused U.S. hegemony. Trump and MAGA, reflecting their exceptionalism, could not imagine that America was actually susceptible to a widely predicted pandemic. Then he simply refused to do what was necessary to arrest the virus: rapid mass testing and tracing to isolate and treat the infected, while paying people to stay home so the resulting economic catastrophe could be brief and mitigated. Both measures were politically unthinkable, so America experienced the public-health version of neither peace nor victory.
A liberal’s nightmare took shape as the public-health crisis went from preventable to inevitable because the government was controlled by people contemptuous of science. For many people, witnessing Washington’s failure to respond to the pandemic was a radicalizing experience, pushing them toward left critiques about how the virus reflected and intensified America’s extant socioeconomic cruelty. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s leftmost foreign policy adviser, wrote in The Atlantic that COVID-19 revealed the emptiness of the previous decade. “Americans will have to rethink the current orientation of our own government and society, and move past our post-9/11 mindset,” he urged, eliding the fact that Obama had accommodated it during his eight years in office.
Rhodes was correct in arguing that the coronavirus should have demonstrated, yet again, the folly of the 9/11 era. After all, the entire architecture of counterterrorism was predicated on the notion of stopping preventable deaths from becoming inevitable. That is what the coronavirus did, and what Trump was disinclined to stop. Yet the reality was that the 9/11 era manifested throughout the coronavirus’s political, social, and cultural impacts.
Bush had neglected to heed the inconvenient warnings conveyed in the CIA’s “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” briefing. It was Trump’s first impulse as well. At the start of 2020, Grenell, Trump’s loyalist acting director of national intelligence, delayed the only annual open briefing from the intelligence leadership. Later it would emerge that the intelligence agencies had, with some urgency, briefed Trump in January and February on the risks of the coronavirus erupting as a global pandemic. Publicly, however, Trump was saying as late as February 26 that “we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people” exposed to the virus. When criticized later, Trump blamed his briefers, particularly the CIA’s Beth Sanner, for not sufficiently impressing upon him that the coronavirus was a massive risk, much as Bush had faulted the Security State for not saying exactly when and where 9/11 would take place. The analysts drew the comparison themselves. “The system was blinking red,” a U.S. official with intelligence access told The Washington Post, deliberately invoking George Tenet’s famous phrase to the 9/11 Commission on the CIA’s plethora of pre-9/11 warnings. The open intelligence briefing never happened, preventing the only chance at the start of the pandemic for the Security State to publicly assess the threat of the coronavirus.
Once the pandemic reached the United States, Trump adopted Bush’s template. He spoke solemnly of an “invisible enemy” after he finally declared a national emergency on March 13. His purpose was not so much to deal with the outbreak as to reap the fealty the country awarded Bush after 9/11. “I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president,” Trump said. Mike Pence’s coronavirus task force was a convenient vessel that Trump could use to frame a narrative of emergency leadership. “This is worse than the World Trade Center,” he accurately said. He intended the comment as a defense against charges of lethargy, without seeming to notice that being right only indicted him.
The surveillance apparatus the Security State had constructed since 9/11 to harvest global communications was useless in the face of the pandemic. While its algorithms were more than capable of conducting contact tracing, they depended on identifying precisely who had tested positive for COVID-19. Trump was slow to adopt any testing. He overpromised his ability to provide test kits by orders of magnitude. Even when rationed testing began in March, it was a perishable resource. The epidemiological purpose of the tests was to prevent a “community spread” that was already underway in Seattle and New York City. On June 20 in Tulsa, at Trump’s first rally after the lockdowns ended, the president boasted of deliberately reducing the rate of tests in order to suppress an accurate portrayal of COVID-19 in America.
Yet many of the data tools that emerged from the counterterrorism surveillance apparatus could help the contractors involved in it seek new markets. Palantir, the data-mining giant started in 2004 with CIA seed money, became, in the Trump era, a major defense contractor. It owed its $800 million government windfall to its billionaire cofounder Peter Thiel, who had been Trump’s ally in Silicon Valley. Thiel had once bemoaned what he considered the incompatibility of democracy and freedom—a crisis prompted by the people’s insufficient enthusiasm for capitalism—and dreamed of seasteading his way out of America’s dreadful politics to colonize a piece of the ocean where the richest people could be (even more) beyond the reach of any law. Now, during an economic shutdown, Palantir made a $25 million deal with FEMA and the Department of Health and Human Services for a data-management platform capable of crunching a stunning 187 data sets on coronavirus-related medical needs into a predictive picture
of where health-care logistics would have to be directed. Palantir, as far as is known, didn’t have access to Americans’ medical records. But, apparently mindful of public distrust, it portrayed itself as having no access to any hospital data at all. In truth, emails showed FEMA instructing states to send their respirator data directly to Palantir. The company never explained if it was under any requirement to purge this windfall of publicly provided data—data that gave its owner a private portrait of which economies were safe to open or close.
Trump couldn’t be a wartime president without a wartime enemy. But the “invisible enemy” couldn’t be bombed. By the spring its domestic spread had become a threat to his presidency: he was losing the war. In another 9/11 pantomime, he sought to capture the loyalty afforded to Bush over the showdown with Saddam Hussein. This time the foreign threat was from China, with the virus as the WMD.
Already a MAGA target owing to Trump’s trade war, China had the virtue of being the epicenter of the outbreak in December 2019, prompting an alarming lockdown of tens of millions of people in Wuhan Province even as the Chinese government assured the world that the coronavirus was manageable. The complication was that Trump, throughout his presidency, couldn’t decide whether to flatter or demonize Xi Jinping. On January 24, the day after Sanner’s intelligence briefing, he thanked Xi “on behalf of the American people” for China’s vigilance “and transparency” in containing the virus. Pompeo ignored any such praise, and opted to refer to the “Wuhan Flu,” a slur that became standard on the right. Blaming China for the virus quickly yielded the same result that blaming Muslims for 9/11 did. On March 14, a nineteen-year-old stabbed Bawi Cung and two of his young sons in the Midland, Texas, Sam’s Club for what the FBI said was the assailant’s belief that they were culpable for spreading coronavirus. A study of police statistics conducted by California State University found hate crimes against Asian Americans rose by 150 percent in 2020. There were at least twenty-eight assaults on Asian New Yorkers, an 833 percent increase from the three such attacks in 2019.
Like the Cheneyites before them, Trump officials pressed the intelligence agencies to substantiate the politically useful “Wuhan Flu” narrative. Pompeo, as well as top National Security Council official Matt Pottinger, pushed the Security State to investigate a discounted theory that the outbreak was the result of a virus that escaped from a Chinese lab. Under Grenell, intelligence analysts publicly concurred on April 30 “with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified”—but added that they would “rigorously examine emerging information” to determine if the lab-outbreak theory was valid. Paul Pillar, who had been a senior CIA Mideast analyst during the Iraq invasion, observed that the kind of politicization that had taken place prior to the war was happening again. It was the inevitable consequence of Trump turning the intelligence agencies into “just one more element of government to be pressed into supporting his own assertions.” Grenell characterized Trump’s skepticism in the coronavirus briefings not as dismissal, but a mark of superior intellect. “You see a president questioning the assumptions and using the opportunity to broaden the discussion to include real-world perspectives,” he said, much as Cheney had portrayed his pressure to connect Saddam to al-Qaeda as the basic due diligence of asking “a hell of a lot of questions.” Soon a dossier prepared by a Pentagon contractor circulated on Capitol Hill. It attempted to portray conclusively that the coronavirus did escape from a Wuhan lab—but used provably false data in a job as sloppy as the Cheneyites’ manufactured alliance between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
Such stillborn efforts reflected MAGA’s desperation. The economic agony that was the result of the belated March shutdown threatened Trump’s hold on power. Many in Trump’s base were inclined to disbelieve that coronavirus was an actual threat. Demographics abetted their delusion. The first wave of coronavirus deaths was disproportionately Black, brown, working class, and generally not the MAGA profile. New York’s second devastation in a generation was this time not accompanied by national solidarity. Without an enemy to turn trauma into bloodlust, MAGA felt no need to hide its hatred. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, an important Trump ally, blamed New Yorkers for bringing to his state “unwittingly or not” a late-March surge in coronavirus cases. Trump, an amalgam of no less than four of the worst kinds of New Yorkers—Outerborough White Racist, Wealth Vampire, Dignity-Free Media Striver, and Landlord—considered quarantining the entire tri-state area.
As the desperation turned vicious, MAGA, and particularly Fox News, distrusted the task-force expert Dr. Anthony Fauci for the same reasons the right had distrusted the U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix in 2002: he represented a source of authority independent from the president. Fauci began to get enough death threats to prompt augmentation of his security detail. The same anger was soon directed at public health officials across the country. By June, The Washington Post noted, the pandemic was “fully entangled with ideological tribalism.” That was imprecise: the lockdowns had substantial public support, with four out of five Americans seeing their value, or simply fearful of coronavirus. More precisely, MAGA viewed the virus as a threat to their conceptions of freedom. Small but persistent protests among right-wingers featured signs defending their right to have someone else cut their hair. In late May the Michigan Conservative Coalition orchestrated Operation Haircut, a barbering station protest outside the state capitol. The capitol itself had been shut down for weeks after white gunmen, unimpeded by police, intimidated the legislature into halting business. Respectable GOP officials began to echo the macabre themes of the jihadis they had considered uncivilized. The lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, told Tucker Carlson that “lots of grandparents out there in this country like me” were prepared to die for the economy. “Don’t sacrifice the country,” Patrick implored. By late June coronavirus cases ticked sharply upward in Texas and DeSantis’s Florida.
In another continuity with the 9/11 era, as the deaths accumulated, the Trump administration used the coronavirus to intensify its existing agenda. In March, after the president blocked entry to travelers from China and then the European Union, the State Department stopped visa services. The following month Trump halted all immigration for sixty days, contending it would be unfair to struggling native-born workers, even while immigrant labor powered “essential” services like health care and food production. By June he expanded the immigration freeze to apply to high-skilled workers, seasonal workers, executives, and scholars. Refugee admissions, already decimated by Trump, were suspended. Even as coronavirus spread through the United States, to the point of requiring the Army Corps of Engineers to aid in constructing additional hospital facilities, the corps doled out contracts for Trump’s southern border wall worth $1.3 billion from late February through early April. The following month a MAGA-favorite firm from North Dakota, Fisher Sand and Gravel, won its very own $1.3 billion slice of the wall bounty, all while being under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general.
However cynical the immigration restrictions were, they ensured that immigrants held in ICE prisons were at the mercy of the invisible enemy. ICE refused entreaties to release the tens of thousands of people it detained who posed no public danger. With no way to social distance inside teeming detention centers, coronavirus outbreaks intensified. Edwin Tineo, detained during the early days of the pandemic in a New Jersey ICE facility where detainees lacked hand soap, toilet paper, and health information, called it “the most stressful thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.” At Krome in Miami, which once held Adham Hassoun, ICE fed Muslim detainees pork while its chaplain shrugged, “It is what it is.” Inside a for-profit ICE prison in Virginia called FarmVille, an intake of seventy-four out-of-state detainees skyrocketed a virus outbreak. The FarmVille guards responded to protests with violence, including pepper sprayings and firing a noise round in a crowded dormitory. “We think we’re going to die without seeing our families,” a desperate detainee said in
July. Weeks later, on August 5, a seventy-two-year-old Canadian detainee, James Hill, died of coronavirus at the prison.
By April the ICE prison at Batavia became, however temporarily, ICE’s leading coronavirus detention center. Adham Hassoun feared for his life. He started a hunger strike in early February to protest his now officially indefinite detention. Already weak and immunocompromised from a heart condition, he grew nervous when an ICE officer mentioned having come down with a flu. Soon he began experiencing body aches and felt as if he was burning up. Hassoun was wary of being taken to the local hospital for fear of exposure, so he remained inside, first in the Batavia clinic and then in the solitary cells known as the SHU. He recovered—it remains unclear if Hassoun actually contracted COVID-19—and being in the SHU may have spared his life, as it separated him from other Batavia coronavirus patients. By late June, forty-nine people at Batavia had contracted COVID-19, a total eclipsed by fourteen other ICE detention facilities. By November, at least eight people had died from the virus in ICE detention.
A lack of concern for the health of those on the front lines was as conspicuous for coronavirus health-care workers as it had been for troops in Iraq. The sloth of the Trump administration in equipping health-care workers rivaled the Rumsfeld Pentagon’s laxity in equipping soldiers properly in Iraq. Both turned to “hillbilly armor.” Just as the soldiers had dug through scrap piles to uparmor their Humvees, nurses wrapped themselves in garbage bags to fashion personal protective equipment.
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