The coronavirus whistleblower complaint proved to us that Trump has become a very desperate president

The president let us know he is willing to let his core supporters get very sick, and expects them to vote for him even if they have to pull an oxygen tank into the voting booth with them, says John T Bennett

Donald Trump tours a factory producing N95 masks in Phoenix, Arizona, on 5 May 2020 (AFP/Getty)

We did not learn much about Donald Trump the president from the latest coronavirus-related whistleblower complaint. But we learned something about Donald Trump the candidate.

Rick Bright, the ousted former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, said in a complaint filed on Tuesday that he “encountered resistance from HHS leadership, including Health and Human Services secretary [Alex] Azar, who appeared intent on downplaying this catastrophic event”.

Bright also stated that he clashed with Azar and other White House-appointed health officials when he raised concerns about hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug Trump has called a “game-changer” treatment for Covid-19 for over a month, even though studies have found it to be largely ineffective.

Sure, we learnt that Azar and his fellow Trump-appointed officials clearly felt pressure from the 45th president to obtain more of the drug and distribute it to hotspots like New York and New Jersey. We learnt, again, that Trump sees himself as the country’s pharmacist-in-chief.

We learnt that, due largely to pressure from a science- and process-sceptical boss, the head of the federal agency in charge of health policy was more than willing to get hydroxychloroquine in the hands of coronavirus patients before the US Food and Drug Administration had tested and approved it as a Covid-19 treatment. We learned Azar and others were willing to do so after the FDA warned of possibly deadly heart issues as a side effect.

We learnt just how much Trump has taken over what parts of the federal bureaucracy he hasn’t dismantled or neutered.

But we knew all of that already. What we really learnt from Bright’s complaint, which the president confirmed a few hours later, is the extent to which Trump is willing to go to secure a second term. And in that regard, we learned just how desperate he has become.

Inside the Health and Human Services Department, which Azar leads, he and other political appointees talked about the malaria drug “as a panacea”, Bright contends. To be blunt, there was not and still is not a shred of evidence to view hydroxychloroquine that way.

Your correspondent is guilty, in retrospect, of writing too many articles since January 2017 with headlines that begin with “Trump bets big…” or “Trump goes all in with…” It’s now clear that’s just who the man is: Donald John Trump does not make small bets.

Bright’s complaint reads like a bad science fiction novel chock-full of elected and appointed officials driven by the wrong motivations. Before its contents could be fully processed, Trump was back on television – which is his preferred medium, no matter what he tries to sell us about his Twitter account.

“It’s possible there will be some” deaths directly caused by his push to reopen the country “because you won’t be locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is,” Trump told ABC News in an interview taped during his trip to Arizona to tour a mask production facility.

“Take a look at what’s going on. People are losing their jobs. We have to bring it back, and that’s what we’re doing,” he added. “We can’t sit in the house for the next three years.”

That’s a big risk for a president with a rural base to take just as, you guessed it, the deadly disease is spreading to rural America.

Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner who now is a physician and professor at George Washington University, brought this warning on Wednesday: “Prepare for a massive surge.”

“Without a vaccine or cure, the only thing keeping the disease in check has been keeping people separated from one another. Once social distancing is relaxed, Covid-19 will again spread with explosive speed,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “The difference is that this time there will likely be numerous outbreaks at once … Also worrisome is that many of these outbreaks will occur in rural communities that already struggle with a lack of hospitals and healthcare workers.”

Trump knows he cannot win again without a rebounding economy. Bright provided a glimpse of a desperate president. Trump let us know he is willing to let his core supporters get very sick, and expects them to vote for him even if they have to pull an oxygen tank into the voting booth with them.

How ironic for a president who preached in his inaugural address about ending “American carnage”.

Yours,

John T Bennett

Washington DC bureau chief