10/5/20
A super-spreader—a term we didn’t much use nine months ago—is a person with a contagious disease who gives it to a lot of other people. In the coronavirus pandemic, super-spreaders have played an outsize role. Scientists have identified super-spreaders who have infected dozens of people with the virus, while others with the illness haven’t infected anyone at all. Super-spreaders may explain why the coronavirus seems to take over so quickly in some places, but not in others. We don’t know yet whether President Donald Trump was a super-spreader of the coronavirus or the victim of one, perhaps at the Rose Garden event for the Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, where few wore masks and many shook hands; perhaps while he was preparing to debate. But Trump has been a super-spreader in a different sense for many, many years—a super-spreader of disinformation. As a businessman, he was a congenital liar who phoned in fake stories about himself to New York tabloids, who lied about his net worth, who exaggerated the height of Trump Tower. As a candidate, he lied about Barack Obama’s birth certificate; he declared falsely that Ted Cruz’s father had helped assassinate John F. Kennedy; he invented a story about “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrating on 9/11. As president, he has lied about so many things that even the nation’s most assiduous fact-checkers have had trouble keeping up.
When the pandemic began, I did hope that the virus would provide a dose of hard reality to American public discourse, one strong enough to break through the fog of disinformation that Trump has created around himself and his administration. My fears were well founded. While the leaders of democracies as varied as Germany, Slovakia, Taiwan, and South Korea fought the virus with the best science and the best public-health information they could muster— the American president kept lying, kept dissembling, kept dodging reality. At the very beginning, Trump didn’t tell Americans what he knew about COVID-19: “I wanted to play it down,” he told Bob Woodward. He lied about what was in his briefings, lied about what he had been told by the Chinese government, lied about his efforts to block travel from China, kept lying all through the spring and the summer. As recently as Tuesday’s debate, he was lying about a vaccine, falsely declaring that the U.S. military would soon be delivering hundreds of thousands of doses. And we are all … unsurprised. This kind of obfuscation, this level of confusion, is exactly what we have come to expect from our national leader. Trump has destroyed our trust with wanton abandon—trust in our political system, trust in our institutions, trust in science, trust in America itself—simply because it benefits him, personally, to do so.
www.defenseone.com
