March 23rd 2020

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH      

Steve Bannon was one of the principals in the Trump presidential campaign.  With Kelly Ann (Alternative Facts) Conway (formerly a pollster, which could account for why she is such a lousy front-person for Trump) Bannon came over from the Ted Cruz campaign when it ended.  Cruz had been funded by the far-right winger Robert Mercer, who brought his money with him to Trump.  (Among other things, Mercer was also a funder of Brexit and climate change denial.)  Bannon brought with him his concept of “The Deconstruction of the Administrative State.”  This was his fancy term for destroying as much of the Federal bureaucracy as possible, given that those particular pieces of the bureaucracy for which he advocated destruction stood in the way, in any way, of private profit-making.  In this he was following in the steps of one Grover Norquist, an advisor to George W. Bush, who famously said “our objective is to shrink the Federal government to the size of a bath-tub and then drown it in the bath-tub.”

Of course the elements of the Federal government which Bannon/Norquist (and just about the whole of the Republican Party since the time of Newt Gingrich, a Norquist devotee) were/are such elements as the Environmental Protection Administration, elements of the Department of Agriculture aimed at corporate farming (and pollution), the Department of Labor in general, the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Education in relation to religious schools and its poisonous relative home-schooling, and so on and so forth.  

Of course, the anti-[certain-parts-of] Federal government policy) is an important strain of Republican doctrine that goes back to the Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.)  It does not include such regulatory agencies at the Federal prison system, the Department of Homeland Security and its active anti-undocumented persons division, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and of course the Department of Defense.  Even though Trump and his minions went full force into “Deconstruction,” Bannon himself didn’t last long.  He was probably just too smart for Trump to have hanging around.

Among the collateral damage of “getting rid of regulation to open up the free market” was the demolition of White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense (which action Trump has had considerable trouble trying to explain) and major elements of such agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  While the bulk of the cutbacks and major changes in regulations were made to increase the power of major U.S. corporations to make profits, there was also the collateral damage brought on by a combination of budget-cutting for anything other than the Military-Industrial Complex and to support tax cuts for the wealthy and the large corporations, and Trump’s visceral hatred for any innovative Federal program associated with President Obama.  But the important point here is that the Bannon Doctrine of the Deconstruction of the Administrative State has had a major negative impact on the Trump Administration’s ability to respond appropriately to the oncoming disaster.  

If Bannon himself, an apparently intelligent and well-educated man, had been asked “well, do you include in ‘Deconstruction’ such elements of the Federal government as those designed to ward off or minimize epidemics,” he probably would have said “no.”  But the combination of his destructive construct, traditional Republican budget cutting for any regulatory functions, and Trump’s Obama-hatred doomed the various Federal programs that could have made the Trumpidemic2020© much less worse than it is, to a combination of extinction, diminution, and poor leadership (chosen more for political adherence that expertise [sound familiar?]). 

A variety of top experts in infectious disease and epidemics were either fired or left the agencies as their budgets were cut.  Also, there were interesting choices for replacements, such as the current CDCP Director, who when he was on the Reagan task-force for dealing with AIDS was considered too right-wing for it (!).  Why? Because his principal contribution apparently was to advocate for abstinence as a major intervention in the epidemic. The present Surgeon General, an anesthesiologist by training, was Mike Pence’s Commissioner of Health in Indiana during the time of the outbreak of HIV infection among opioid addicts in Southern Indiana.  The governor’s policy, at the beginning, fully supported by that Commissioner, was to prevent the initiation of a clean-needle exchange program that could have reduced HIV transmission. But even the Trump CDC recently made a very negative projection of what might happen with COVID-19.  It was suppressed. To his great credit, and certainly risking his place behind Trump on the podium (while of course at the same reducing his risk of infection due to closeness), on March 23 the Surgeon General issued a very strong statement saying “it's going to get very bad this week and the virus needs to be taken very seriously.” Good for him.

And so, in relation to what has become the Trumpidemic2020© there was a series of events or non-events that occurred beginning last fall that has made it and its outcomes much worse than they had to be.  E.g., in The New York Times there was a report of a major simulation done last year which virtually predicted the Trumpidemic 2020.  Of course there were the reports to Congress this past February which, among other things, caused various members to dump stock which might take a hit in such an event as the Trumpidemic2020©.  And etc. This all at the time when Trump and his Charlie McCarthy Sean Hannity (or is it ‘tother way round) were pooh-poohing any projections of major spread of the Corona virus here.  The details of this horror-show have been reviewed here and here and in many, many other places.  But where does it go from here, in terms of Trump and Trumpites?  The Trumpidemic2020 is scary enough. What may happen politically in the United States is equally scary (or even scarier in terms of the history of our republic). 

Originally, I thought like many other observers did that in his pooh-pooh/denial mode Trump really did want the coming epidemic to just go away or least not be tallied up because reports of any significant number of cases would hurt the stock markets and his poll numbers, and that would hurt his re-election chances.  But all of a sudden there has been the well-known total 180. Trump is now pretending to lead the charge against the rapidly expanding epidemic, mainly by repeatedly telling lies about what his Administration is doing about it (and he does lie continually, there are new ones every day --- the man is very creative) and the tremendous toll it is about take both on the national population and also on the woefully under-equipped medical/nursing/health-services work force that needs to deal with it.

But then one has to ask “why?”  Why are Trump and the Trumpites behind him doing this, after several months of total denial, all of a sudden taking over, or at least trying to appear to be taking over, a comprehensive national effort to deal with COVID-19?  Very briefly here, and given that further space and thought are needed to delve more deeply into the various possibilities for Trumpite triumph in the end, among them are: 

1.   By some miracle (and this seems to be highly unlikely given all the modelling that has gone on), the epidemic, somehow on its own, quickly peaks at not too high a number and then as quickly subsides.  In this case, Trump and his flunkies will say “see, we were right all along. It was just my enemies (especially the “fake news” [in German, “Die Luegen Presse”]) who made all the fuss.”  And seeming to have been right and in charge he goes right on to re-election. 

2.   Somehow or other, with a combination of the various lockdowns and the proper supplies getting to the hospitals quickly enough, either with the help of Federal policy or in spite of it, the disease is brought under control without massive spread, too many deaths, and not too much decimation of medical/nursing/health-care staff around the country brought on by the terrible apparent lack-of-supply situation.  Then Trump would claim credit for his “leadership” (even though when things were not going so well he denied any responsibility). That would give him a tremendous boost towards re-election. Of course, there will also be so much Trumpublican© cheating (and likely pro-Trump Russian interference again, aided perhaps by other foreign countries this time around) in the 2020 election that whatever happens in the Trumpidemic2020©, whatever the true public view of Trump’s actions or inaction might be, that view might not make any difference in the outcome. 

3.   More sinister is that the Trumpidemic2020© gets worse and worse, that medical facilities and staffs are decimated, that Trump of course blames it all on everybody else (and it would be everybody else, from the Chinese and Obama [already up front in his sights] to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to Joe Biden to every national expert on epidemiology, infectious disease, and public health), and then that he attempts to postpone the Presidential election (of course indefinitely).  Constitutionally that would be very difficult if not impossible to do.  But when has the Constitution stopped Trump before? After all, he has said that the Constitution (it would be Sect. 2 of Article 2, but he has likely never read the document, so what the hey) “Allows me to do whatever I want.”  And so, he could try. The case (and there wold be a case) would go to the Supreme Court, which would make Chief Justice John Roberts one of the most powerful men in U.S. history.  But even if the Court ruled against him, he might just ignore it and, just stay put in the White House and, perhaps, surround himself with a “people’s militia” (see Die Sturmabteilung, but much smaller). 

4.   The most sinister outcome of course would be the declaration of martial law and the establishment of a virtual dictatorship, or as much of it that the Trumpublicans© could achieve at this time.  How they would get there, what it would look like and how they would attempt to stay in power is a subject for another time. But you can rest assured that it is front and center in the minds of certain Trumpublicans© and the ruling class sector that they represent.