Horowitz: Trump’s Major Credibility Problem on Coronavirus

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

President Donald Trump

When only 36% of the American people believe the president is honest, as the Pew Research Center found in a recent poll, it is especially important that when facing a public health problem of the likely scale of the Coronavirus, that he makes every effort to convey only accurate information and at least appears to be putting the health of the American people ahead of politics. As will surprise no one who has watched President Trump over the past three years or so, unfortunately, he has done the exact opposite, repeatedly misusing his unique bully pulpit to say things that are simply false and directly contradicted by his own health officials. In doing so, he is standing in the way of the honest, straightforward and un-muddled communication that is essential to limiting the consequences of this pandemic.

The realities on the ground, where there are now more than 500 cases and more than 20 deaths and with public health experts predicting that when testing becomes widely available and the outcomes of community spread set in these numbers will increase exponentially, have already outrun the president’s persistent efforts to downplay and dismiss the impacts of the virus. He even called the efforts of some Democrats to raise serious concerns a ‘hoax’’, seemingly equating it to the Mueller probe and the Ukrainian scandal, which he views, despite all the evidence to the contrary, as unfair attacks on him.

For President Trump, playing the victim of what he defines as unfair opponents has been a limited success when confronting political scandals in large measure of his own making, but is unlikely to be persuasive with all but his most committed supporters in the case of the Coronavirus. Here, there are real flesh and blood victims and they are fellow Americans.

Yet, as recently as Friday, President Trump still didn’t seem to realize that he needs a new playbook. In a truly divorced from reality and markedly un-presidential appearance at The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, he said, “As of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test [can have one], that’s the important thing, and the tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect.” Trump’s blatant falsehood on the availability of the tests forced Vice-President Pence and the administration’s own health experts to contradict him over the weekend. And calling the tests perfect like his call with the Ukrainian president is simply nonsensical, given that most Americans think he did something seriously wrong in his actions on Ukraine. As president in a health crisis, it is important to communicate in a way that is persuasive to the whole nation--not just the most committed slice of your base.

Even worse was Trump’s assertion in the same appearance that he preferred that the several thousand people on a cruise ship docked in San Francisco stay offshore because it would up the number of cases reported “I would rather because I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump remarked. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault. And it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship either, okay? It wasn’t their fault either and they’re mostly Americans. So, I can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.” For the president, it appears that the statistics being reported are more important than the welfare of the passengers on board. This is even more disturbing when one realizes that even if as is likely the number of passengers infected will go up substantially from the 21 cases already identified, it will end up increasing. the total number of American cases by a rounding error at best, once this is all said and done.

The president’s continuing false and misleading comments are not just politically tone-deaf; they will potentially have damaging real-world impacts. Republicans are less likely to be seriously concerned about the Coronavirus than Democrats, according to several recent polls. As a result, there is a good chance they will be less likely to get tested, if symptoms emerge or they are exposed to a person who learns they have the virus, and more likely to go to work and potentially infect others.

As Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his Sunday New York Times column, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wingers’ cavalier dismissal of the threat of the Swine Flu during the Obama Administration, asserting that President Obama was hyping it for his own political purposes, resulted in fewer Republicans getting vaccinated. “Matthew Baum of Harvard found that people in red states were indeed less likely to get vaccinated — and more likely to die of swine flu,” wrote Kristof.

President Trump has a far bigger megaphone than even Rush Limbaugh, and so far his megaphone has been amplified by Rush and certain opinion hosts and guests on Fox News in downplaying the impacts of the Coronavirus and casting doubt on the factual presentations of public health experts.

“As Tom Inglesby, an infectious diseases physician and director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in a recent interview, “It’s really important for the U.S. government to be speaking with one common voice about these issues right now.”

Mr. President, he is talking to you.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.