9/11/20
President Trump’s taped admission to Bob Woodward that he deliberately misled Americans about the danger of the coronavirus makes him morally culpable in the ensuing tragedy. But Mr. Trump actually forfeited the battle against the pandemic long before it erupted in Wuhan, China, in the first place. His tragic failures are a result of a systematic skepticism — an opportunistic cynicism — whose orienting principle is that everything that benefits Mr. Trump is true and everything that inconveniences him is false. Five centuries ago, Niccolò Machiavelli called this the “effectual truth”: Claims that are true, he wrote in “The Prince,” are so not because they correspond to objective reality but because they are politically “useful.” Mr. Trump’s use of skepticism as a standard for interpreting reality now risks undermining public faith in an eventual vaccine. In his capstone address to the Republican National Convention, Mr. Trump promised a vaccine “before the end of the year or maybe even sooner.” That might be written off as a mere prediction of events, except that Mr. Trump tipped his hand in a pair of tweets directed against the Food and Drug Administration. Together, they displayed the systematic skepticism that has derailed the administration’s pandemic response.
In one tweet, Mr. Trump rebuked the F.D.A. for revoking its emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug the president has repeatedly touted as a coronavirus treatment: “Many doctors and studies disagree with this!” That skepticism now appears to be guiding the search for a vaccine. The same morning Mr. Trump insisted on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, another presidential tweet accused “the deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA” of “making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd.” The reference to Election Day was the giveaway. Mr. Trump was concerned not with prudential or objective assessments of proposed vaccines but rather with their “effectual truth.” By definition, the F.D.A. was moving too slowly because moving more quickly would help him politically. Mr. Trump has undermined any reason for confidence in such a judgment by staking his claim to the effectual rather than the actual truth. When a vaccine is actually ready, public trust in it will be a vital tool for ending the pandemic. On the other hand, should a vaccine suddenly appear on the eve of the election under obvious political pressure, the systematic skeptics who interpret truth through Mr. Trump’s eyes could prove their fidelity to him by being the first in line to receive it.
