As the horrific death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to soar, many of President Donald Trump’s critics are pointing out how badly he downplayed the threat back in January and February — when, like his boosters at Fox News, he insisted that COVID-19 didn’t pose a major threat to the United States (where, according to researchers at John Hopkins University and a Hopkins-related page on CNN’s website, it has killed more than 11,000 people as of late Tuesday morning, April 7). Legal experts Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes, in an article for The Atlantic, assert that Trump’s supporters are privately admitting that his coronavirus response was an abysmal failure — while publicly offering lame excuses and rationalizations in his defense.
One such rationalization is that because House Democrats impeached Trump, the president and the Senate were unfairly distracted from the pandemic. Jurecic and Wittes note that a Breitbart News headline absurdly claimed, “Democrats Pushed Impeachment While Coronavirus Spread” and that Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Fox News’ Sean Hannity have picked up on that absurd line of attack.
Cotton told Politico, “It’s unfortunate that during the early days of a global pandemic, the Senate was paralyzed by a partisan impeachment trial.” And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told far-right talk radio host Hugh Hewitt that Trump’s impeachment trial “diverted the attention of the government…. because everything every day was all about impeachment.”
But the pro-Trump excuses, according to Jurecic and Wittes, don’t end with that impeachment-related one.
“Over the past two months,” the attorneys explain, “President Donald Trump has deployed a dizzying array of lies about why the coronavirus wasn’t a cause for concern, then defenses to excuse or deny his deadly mishandling of the pandemic. The virus was under control in the United States, he argued. The warm weather would make it go away. It would miraculously vanish. It was China’s fault, and limiting travel from China had solved the problem. It was the media’s fault for exaggerating things. It was Barack Obama’s fault. States in urgent need of ventilators should have purchased the medical equipment months ago, and it isn’t the president’s responsibility to fix that problem.”
But the impeachment-related defense, Jurecic and Wittes write, stands out as the most “absurd” of all.
“It’s difficult to decide which of these defenses is the most absurd,” Jurecic and Wittes write. “But one defense that has emerged in recent weeks as the go-to explanation certainly has the honor of being the most unintentionally damning. The argument, as put forward by Republican officeholders and other supporters of the president, goes like this: don’t blame Trump for his administration’s appalling handling of the crisis. Rather, it’s all the Democrats’ fault, as their drummed-up impeachment drama distracted the president during the key period, during which the government could have ramped up its response to the pandemic.”
One of the problems with that impeachment-related argument in Trump’s defense, according to Jurecic and Wittes, is that it is “actually a concession of Trump’s own failure” because those making it “are all of a sudden acknowledging that his performance could have been better.”
Conservative Never Trump attorney George Conway has been tearing apart the “Trump was distracted by impeachment” line of defense, noting that Trump’s impeachment trial ended on February 5 and that he had “plenty of time to deal with the virus” back in January and February.
The coronavirus death toll in the U.S. is likely to grow much higher than the more than 11,000 fatalities reported by Hopkins on Tuesday morning, April 7. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, both key members of Trump’s coronavirus task force, have cited figures predicting a death toll of 100,000-240,000 in the U.S. alone — even with aggressive social distancing measures. But no matter how many Americans die from coronavirus, Trump will still have his relentless defenders.
“Whatever he does, however much he leverages his power for personal benefit at the public’s expense —whether with foreign heads of state or state officials, whether in public or in private — he can get away with it,” Jurecic and Wittes lament. “And the death toll will only rise as a result.”
