In any war, reality has a way of changing the battle plans of even the most stubborn and vainglorious of generals. Even, it seems, President Trump.
Over the weekend, Trump appeared to surrender to the facts. A month ago, he had foolishly predicted that the number of cases of covid-19 in the United States would soon be “down to close to zero.” On Sunday, he argued that keeping the number of deaths in this country below 100,000 — not cases, which may soar into the millions, but fatalities — would mean having done “a very good job.”
I realize it’s always dangerous to be optimistic where Trump is concerned. Perhaps I’m going with hope over experience, but for the first time, I have the sense that the White House accepts the scientific consensus about the threat covid-19 poses. I heard Trump’s usual bluster and bombast at his Rose Garden performance this weekend, but I also heard realism.
Trump’s decision to keep in place national social-distancing guidelines until April 30 abandoned his insane notion that it would be “great to have all of the churches full” on Easter. Potentially even more important, however, was Trump’s prediction that the nation could be getting back to normal by June 1. The inference is that we’ll still be shut down, at least to some extent, through May.
As a practical matter, governors such as Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Larry Hogan of Maryland and many others were sure to keep their stay-at-home orders in place no matter what Trump decided at the end of the initial distancing period. But this sea change matters for those states, because the president is no longer contradicting state and local orders.
And it potentially matters even more in states such as Mississippi, where Gov. Tate Reeves classified restaurants, bars and almost all businesses as “essential,” and eligible to remain open, because he wanted no part of “dictatorship models like China.” Trump’s pivot ought to put all Republican officials, Fox News anchors and rank-and-file wearers of “Make America Great Again” hats on notice: The Trump-approved way to think about covid-19 is no longer to see it as a minor problem overblown by the president’s enemies in the liberal media. Now the pandemic is a mortal threat that could cost more than 2 million lives, according to your Dear Leader himself, if we fail to take it seriously.
If Trump’s road-to-Damascus conversion is genuine, we apparently have Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to thank. They reportedly gave Trump a comprehensive presentation on the most up-to-date data and projections for how the pandemic might progress, leading him to finally abandon — for now, at least — his contrarian views.
According to published reports, the administration had been influenced by the views of Richard Epstein, a New York University law professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, who wrote a March 16 article predicting the United States would face no more than 50,000 cases of covid-19 and “about 500 deaths at the end,” a number he later raised by a factor of 10 after saying he committed an error. We’ve now seen more than 150,000 cases and more than 2,500 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University tally, proving it is better to listen to trained epidemiologists than libertarian ideologues.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Birx referred specifically to the projections of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The IHME predicts that the epidemic will peak nationally in the next two to four weeks and that by July it will claim 82,000 American lives — and that’s assuming strict social-distancing practices are observed.
The administration’s response to the pandemic is still far from ideal, and Trump is still fundamentally the same person. In keeping with his reliance on the vagaries of the private sector, he praised two major insurers that are waiving co-pays for covid-19-related treatment, but could offer no such assurances about other big insurance firms. And as usual, he snarled at White House correspondents whose questions and coverage he does not like.
If the world has changed overnight, Trump has not. But for now, at least, we’re on a saner path. Stay home, everybody, and stay safe.
Twitter: @Eugene_Robinson
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