Trump and other populists are using coronavirus for their own political ends – and we will all suffer for it

The Trump administration’s handling of the virus illustrates the dangers of the politicisation of everything under this president and his ilk across the world

A note by a hospital in California released late on Wednesday suggested that the United States government health officials under the authority of President Donald Trump were deliberating for nearly a week before administering a coronavirus test to a patient suspected of carrying the illness.

“Since the patient did not fit the existing CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] criteria for Covid-19, a test was not immediately administered,” said the note, which went on to explain how the patient turned out to be the first person in the US to contract the virus from a local community rather than carry it in from abroad.

It’s no mystery why Trump may have potentially wanted to suppress information about the spread of the virus, which has hammered the stock market just as the 2020 presidential election campaign gets underway. In a tweet, Trump raged that news channels were “doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible.”

On Saturday, facing a potential political crisis, Trump to the podium to address the coronavirus outbreak, before veering off towards talk about the new Afghanistan peace deal.

The administration’s handling of the virus illustrates the dangers of the politicisation of everything under Trump and his ilk across the world.

Just a couple of years ago, Trump looked to gut the CDC, including its pandemic response team, attempting to slash $1.2 billion from the agency’s budget and use the savings to reward the military contractors that are the pillars of his Republican Party.

“Proposed CDC budget: unsafe at any level of enactment,” Tom Frieden, the former head of the agency, wrote back then. “Would increase illness, death, risks to Americans, and health care costs.”

Even as late as two weeks ago, Trump was pushing to slash government spending on healthcare research and public health, as well as reducing US funding for the World Health Organisation, the commendable United Nations agency now on front lines of fighting coronavirus.

US officials have repeatedly criticised other countries for their handling of the coronavirus. Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, took Iran and China to task last week for being less than forthcoming about the outbreak of the disease, which has struck both countries hard.

“All nations, including Iran, should tell the truth about the coronavirus and cooperate with international aid organisations,” he told reporters.

But while authoritarian regimes with little history of transparency or accountability are ill-equipped to deal responsibly with crises that require public trust and professionalism, so too are democracies dominated by cynical populists like Trump or Boris Johnson.

Such characters have shown a willingness to twist the truth for political gain at times of crisis, even at the cost of human lives.

As if to confirm Trump’s cynicism, he has named his obsequious vice president Mike Pence the point person for the US response to the coronavirus. Pence is not a public health professional, nor even a doctor like sometimes White House ally Senator Rand Paul. He’s a former governor and rightwing radio host who allegedly badly bungled his home state of Indiana’s response to a HIV crisis.

Pence’s only qualification appears to be unswerving loyalty to the president, and a willingness to lie for him, which makes him not so different than the Communist Party apparatchiks in China, or the clerical loyalists to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Iran, accused of downplaying coronavirus for political ends.

According to the New York Times, one of his first orders of business was to get the nation’s top health officials to stop talking about coronavirus, as if the “prayers” Pence hoped would ward away HIV during his tenure as governor of Indiana would work better than the needle-exchange programmes he rejected.

In addition to rejecting science, Trump, along with like-minded rightwingers across the Atlantic like Hungary’s Victor Orban, have already exploited the coronavirus epidemic to justify their hostility to immigrants, which they often equate to germs or infestations in racist tropes that harken back to the darkest moments of the 20th century.

“The free circulation of goods and people, immigration policies and weak controls at the borders obviously allow the exponential spread of this type of virus,” Aurélia Beigneux, a member of the European Parliament from France’s far right, said during a rally in February.

Loudmouth populists like Trump and Johnson may be more entertaining than straitlaced professional politicians, and for the media, they draw more readers and viewers than Germany’s Angela Merkel or the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte. But real the cost of having such ideologues in charge is needless suffering and death.