The not-so-hidden and terrifying message is that political opportunism, the drive for profits and the embrace of a cruel neoliberal ideology are being embraced by the Trump administration without apology. Trump appears to take pleasure in belittling experts and expertise and only follows the advice of public health officials in the midst of the most dire warnings. He treats the pandemic as a partisan battle, disparages governors desperately calling for supplies, and refuses to implement a coordinated national federal approach to addressing the crisis.
Without hard evidence or scientific proof, Trump endorses specific drugs as treatments, falsely claims the U.S. is "close to a vaccine" and often relies on the advice of right-wing pundits who push conspiracy theories. When it comes to the choice of saving lives or the economy, Trump appears more concerned about the fate of Wall Street. What is more, his often confused and contradictory public remarks are filled with hyperbole and falsehoods and serve to mislead the American public while potentially causing unimaginable misery along with the possibility that "Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe millions would get sick and die." In this instance, sheer incompetence coupled with an aversion to experts and scientific evidence rise to the status of being a public danger and a catastrophic crisis.
In light of the ongoing spread of deaths, infections, and hospital shortages and public health catastrophe, experts have called for long-term planning, strategies, increased testing, and coordination between the federal government and the states. Many governors have complained that the government's lack of a federal plan has created something akin to the "Wild West" a "system beset by shortages, inefficiencies and disorder."
The urgency of demands are amplified by the fact that the White House and leadership at multiple levels failed to provide any sense of urgency and immediacy in the early stage of the looming crisis. A report by The Washington Post stated that it took Trump 70 days from first being notified about the grave implications of the coronavirus to treat it "not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America's defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens."
Of course, the many people who are and will die as a result of this reckless policy will be those traditionally viewed as disposable under the reign of neoliberalism. These include the elderly, the destitute, poor people of color, undocumented immigrants and people with disabilities not to mention the front-line medical workers who lack the equipment they need to be safe as they treat the elderly, sick and dangerously ill.
There is more at work here than a hardened depravity of an ill-informed, petty celebrity politician who is causing havoc and needless human suffering in a time of crisis. Trump has always had a penchant for thoughtlessness and self-absorption, and takes delight in humiliating others. Citing Stephen Greenblatt in a different context, his words perfectly fit Trump for whom "There is no deep secret about his cynicism, cruelty and treacherousness, no glimpse of anything redeemable in him, and no reason to believe that he could ever govern the country effectively."
Trump's crudeness, mendacity, disregard for science, and arbitrary rule had led him to disregard previous warnings from experts about the possibility of a looming pandemic. This willful form of ignorance and sheer effrontery was on display in his earlier refusal and colossal failure to mobilize the power of the federal government to provide widespread testing and masks while simultaneously ensuring that hospitals and medical staff had enough beds, masks, ventilators and other personal protective equipment for treating people infected with the virus.
Ed Pilkington and Tom McCarthy report in The Guardian that Trump not only downplayed the threat the virus posed after the World Health Organization confirmed that there were 282 confirmed cases in several countries on January 20, his actions were "mired in chaos and confusion." Rather than act quickly to avert a national health disaster, Trump let six weeks go by before his administration took seriously the severity of the threat and the need for mass testing. Pilkington quotes Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the U.S. government's response in 2013-2017 to a number of international disasters. He stated: "We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times."
Trump has a penchant for turning politics into a form of theater and entertainment into a form of cruelty. In a shocking display of pettiness, he publicly told Vice President Mike Pence not to answer the calls of those governors who are not "appreciative" of his efforts to deal with the pandemic. This includes Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, both of whom have made desperate pleas for critically needed supplies.
Moreover, as part of an ongoing effort to shift blame away from himself, Trump has attacked and attempted to humiliate reporters who asked him critical questions, and went so far as to claim that "hospitals had squandered or done worse with masks and were 'hoarding' ventilators, and that states were requesting equipment despite not needing them." He went so far as to suggest that much-needed masks were "going out the back door." It is hard to overlook this type of weaponized cruelty, especially given the moving pleas by medical professionals appearing on social media begging for masks, gowns, ventilators and other crucial protective and lifesaving equipment. There is more at work here than the politics of denial and solipsism on the part of Trump; there is also what Robert Jay Lifton calls "malignant normality," which I interpret as behavior that revels in violence and is fueled by what appears to be an immense pleasure in engaging in acts of cruelty. We have seen echoes of such cruelty in other eras with consequences that resulted in the death of millions, such as in the lynching of Blacks in the United States and acts of genocide in Nazi Germany.
Trump's obsession with wealth and ratings, and his limitless self-regard define him not only as an inept leader but also as a dangerous fraud. For instance, in the midst of the rapidly rising death toll in the United States, Trump boasted at one of his press media appearances "about the [high] ratings for the White House's coronavirus task force briefings." This is a form of political theater and pandemic pedagogy that weaponizes a rising death toll in the service of entertainment. Trump's incompetence bears tragic results in that hospitals are overcrowded, medical personnel lacking adequate protective equipment are dying, and the governors of hardest-hit states such as New York appear to be in a running feud with Trump, who is more at ease in insulting governors who have criticized him for his lack of leadership than in supplying them with much-needed medical equipment.
Trump and his administration are not alone in pushing a necropolitics that celebrates death over life, capital over human needs, greed over compassion, exploitation over justice and fear over shared responsibilities. How else to explain the chorus of Trump supporters in the media, corporate board rooms and the White House arguing for rationing life-saving care on the basis of age and disability in order to prevent imposing drastic strains on the nation's hospitals and the U.S. economy? How else to explain that long before this pandemic crisis, as Naomi Klein points out, the apostles of neoliberalism have attempted to underfund services, such as "state-funded health care, clean water, good public schools, safe workplaces, pensions, and other programs to care for the elderly and disadvantaged."
At the same time, a war has been waged by predatory capitalism on "the very idea of the public sphere and the public good." One consequence is that "the publicly owned bones of society roads, bridges, levees and water systems are going to slip into a state of such disrepair that it takes little to push them beyond the breaking point. When you massively cut taxes so that you don't have money to spend on much of anything besides the police and the military, this is what happens."
What is being revealed in the current pandemic crisis is the underlying plague of neoliberalism that has dominated the global economy for the last 40 years, though increasingly brandished as a badge of honor by fascist politicians, such as Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and others. Ruling-class corruption is also readily visible in a bailout package which, as Rob Urie observes, amounts to "Bailouts for the Rich, the Virus for the Rest of Us." He writes:
"In an economy where the richest 1% takes all the gains while the poor and working class haven't seen a raise in four decades, it is the rich who will reap the benefits while workers get sick and die. It is finance capitalism that is being bailed out when it should have suffocated under its own weight in 2009."
What is being revealed in this looming pandemic is an unabashed resurgence of fascist politics with its history of grotesque inequalities, disposability, unadulterated cruelty and regressive policies. The latter neoliberal rudiments have a long legacy in the United States and have returned with revenge under the Trump administration. Neoliberal fascism signals a resurgence of a terror that bears an eerie echo to the racial cleansing and embrace of eugenics that marked the purification policies of the Hitler regime and made the concentration camp the endpoint of fascism. This was also policy designed to reboot the economy in a time of crisis.
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