Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them
Letter from Trump’s Washington
Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them
By Susan Glasser
April 23, 2020
Healthcare workers wheel deceased people to a refrigerated trailer.
To the extent that President Trump discusses those who have died, he does so in self-justifying terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been worse without him.Photograph by Michael Nagle / Redux
In just the past few days, President Trump has blamed immigrants, China, the “fake news” and, of course, “the invisible enemy” of the coronavirus for America’s present troubles. He has opined extemporaneously about his plans to hold a grand Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall and has announced that he planted a tree on the White House lawn in honor of Earth Day. He has offered his opinion on matters small and large, bragged about himself as “the king of ventilators,” and spent much time lamenting the pandemic-inflicted passing of what he invariably (and inaccurately) calls “the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
Despite the flood of words, though, what has struck me the most this week is what Trump does not talk about: the mounting toll of those who have died in this crisis. So voluble that he regularly talks well past dinnertime at his nightly briefings, the President somehow never seems to find time to pay tribute to those who have been lost, aside from reading an occasional scripted line or two at the start of his lengthy press conferences, or a brief mention of a friend in New York who died of the disease soon after calling him at the White House. “He said, ‘I tested positive.’ Four days later he was dead,” the President recounted. “So this is a tough deal.” It was not exactly the prayerful, if often politically expedient, mournfulness Americans generally expect of their elected leaders. Trump, for the most part, dispenses even with the ritualistic clichés that other politicians, regardless of party or creed, have always offered in times of crisis.
But the numbers are the numbers, and, notwithstanding Trump’s relentless happy talk, the coronavirus epidemic has, as of this week, already produced some fifty thousand American dead. This is not, needless to say, a best-case scenario, or anything close to it. Just a few weeks ago, a survey of scientific experts predicted forty-seven thousand U.S. dead by the beginning of May, according to the Web site FiveThirtyEight. Instead, forty-seven thousand deaths were recorded by this Wednesday, April 22nd, well before the experts had anticipated. On April 8th, a leading model at the University of Washington had revised its projections downward to forecast a total of sixty thousand American deaths by the beginning of August. But the nation now looks to hit that number by May 1st, meaning that, just a few days from now, more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than the entire toll from the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Trump talks of reopening the country, and of the “tremendous strides against this invisible enemy.”
You would think that no amount of Trumpian misdirection could disguise the awful fact that America has more confirmed coronavirus deaths than any country in the world, and that many of them might have been prevented by earlier, more decisive government action when the President was denying that the coronavirus even presented a threat to the United States. But Trump is trying his hardest to ignore the COVID-19 deaths. To the extent that he discusses those who have died, he tends to do so largely in self-justifying, explicitly political terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been much, much worse without him. Earlier this deadly spring, Trump was briefly scared into a more sombre public presentation by projections that showed hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. deaths if no preventative actions were taken. Now he cites the absence of those worst-case scenarios as proof of his own brilliant handling of the crisis. The numbers of dead citizens he throws about, meanwhile, seem to be abstractions to a President who believes that even the subject of mass death is all about him. “If we didn’t do the moves that we made, you would have had a million, a million and a half, two million people dead,” he said on Monday. “You would have had ten to twenty to twenty-five times more people dead than all of the people that we’ve been watching. That’s not acceptable. The fifty thousand is not acceptable. It’s so horrible. But can you imagine multiplying that out by twenty or more? It’s not acceptable.” Trump did not pause to offer any sort of regret or sorrow, and instead claimed that the entire death toll in the United States would end up around fifty or sixty thousand as a result of his heroic moves. Of course, this was not true; that is, essentially, how many have already passed away.
Honoring the dead has long been one of the tests of American Presidential leadership. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was, after all, not just another political speech but a remembrance of those who were killed in the bloodiest single battle of the Civil War, in which some fifty thousand Americans became casualties and about eight thousand died. Twenty-five years ago this week, Bill Clinton’s lip-bitingly empathetic response to the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a white supremacist blew up a federal building and killed a hundred and sixty-eight people, was seen as a key moment of his tenure. He was dubbed the “mourner-in-chief,” at a time when he was languishing politically. That speech is often said to have saved his Presidency. More recently, Barack Obama wept from the White House lectern in speaking about the deaths of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, and gave arguably the speech of his lifetime in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, singing “Amazing Grace” as he mourned at a funeral service for nine African-Americans killed by a white supremacist at a church massacre. Even those Presidents who aren’t particularly good at speechifying—think of the two George Bushes—have considered public commiseration amid national tragedy part of the job description. Have we ever had a President just take a pass on human empathy, even of the manufactured, politically clichéd kind?
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you could find out. 
