Four years ago this week, Donald Trump claimed that the U.S. had “met the moment and … prevailed,” not over COVID-19, but over the test shortage that had hobbled the nation’s response for over four months as the virus spread around the world and across the country. As with most things Trump said about the pandemic, that was a lie.
The reason for that lie is almost as foolish as Trump’s statement—the U.S. had simply failed to stockpile enough nose swabs to go with the tests that were being made. Without those swabs, the tests were left sitting unused on shelves. And there were no swabs because Trump left the supply planning up to his son-in-law Jared Kushner who had no concept how to handle a medical crisis.
In May 2020, the U.S. passed a horrific physical and spiritual milestone as COVID-19 deaths reached 100,000. Job losses were off the charts. Trump was working with Saudi Arabia and Russia to keep oil prices high. And the United States was a nation in mass trauma with freezer trucks full of bodies in New York City and consumers hoarding toilet paper.
And now Trump is actually running on claims that America was better off four years ago.
When people look back at the tragedies of the Great Depression or the ravages of World War II, it’s understandable that information may be lost over generations. Younger Americans may not understand the fear, hardship, and disruption of a national crisis decades in the past.
But according to some polls, most Americans seem to have forgotten what life was like just four years ago. By May of 2020, Trump had already started racking up a body count with hydroxychloroquine and pondered the possibility of injecting bleach. But Trump’s biggest contribution to America’s mishandling of the pandemic was just misinformation. To put it simply, Trump pretended that the pandemic wouldn’t happen until it did, and when it did, he promised it would go away like “a miracle.”
CNN has a nice graphic illustrating the relationship between the growing number of COVID-19 cases in the United States, and one simple phrase from Trump: “It’s going to go away.”
The Washington Post captured just how many times he’s said that very phrase:
In February, Trump insisted that the virus would just go away in April as the weather warmed. He would keep making this claim into the spring, even though outbreaks in the southern hemisphere showed that heat was not a magic bullet against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. When April arrived, the U.S. was seeing over 30,000 new cases a day, and Trump’s advice was still that “It’s going to go. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone.”
Only COVID-19 refused to pack its suitcase and depart.
Even in May 2020, with over 20,000 new cases being reported each day, Trump insisted that COVID would “go away” even without a vaccine. Instead, the rate of both new cases and new deaths would triple in the next month.
The country that Trump left behind was a hot mess. The week of Nov. 7 when President Joe Biden was elected, almost 9,000 Americans were dying of COVID-19 each week, but before he could take office that number would reach 26,000 deaths per week. The rate of deaths would never again reach that level, even during spikes generated by new and more contagious variants.
The unemployment rate when Biden was sworn in was 6.4%. It would never be that high under Biden.
It’s hard to understand how anyone can feel they were better off four years ago than they are today. But then again, maybe brain worms are more common than we knew.
