Such magical thinking was tyrannical, delusive, and irresponsible. It was tyrannical, in Plato’s sense of the word, because it revealed the tyrant’s narcissistic concern for his own image (“the numbers”) over the reality lived by others—in this case the reality of an epidemic that would kill more Americans than any in the past hundred years. It was delusive because it confused looking away with taking action, the absence of testing with the absence of infection. Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to test did not mean that we were healthy, only that we were ignorant. It was irresponsible because it transferred accountability for American lives away from himself and our government. As Mr. Trump denied any “fault,” the disease was spreading in our country, unobserved and untreated. His focus on a foreign source of “fault” meant that no one here was to blame. When no one bears responsibility, no one has to do anything.
Historians know that before we understood disease we blamed it on others, often people we had treated badly. In the fourteenth century, Christians used the bubonic plague as an excuse to murder Jews to whom they owed money. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European sailors transmitted a number of new diseases to the New World and brought one back. Syphilis came first in the bodies of Spanish sailors, and so the English at first called it “Spanish.” Italians called it “French,” as did Shakespeare. The Poles called it “German” or “American.” Russians called it “Polish.” In the Ottoman Empire it was called “Christian.”
After contagion was understood, some people mischaracterized the science by associating whole groups with bacteria and viruses, or by claiming that hidden enemies delivered biological weapons. American racists portrayed blacks as vessels of germs. The Nazis blamed venereal disease, typhus, and tuberculosis on Jews. Stalinists blamed pestilence on Americans, and Russians later said the same about AIDS. Russia claimed that coronavirus was an American bioweapon as early as January 2020. China soon said the same, while some American politicians blamed a Chinese bioweapons lab. The Republican Party, recognizing that Mr. Trump’s coronavirus policy was catastrophic, planned its fall 2020 election campaigns around blaming China for everything.
Seeing disease as foreign obscures an essential fact: no matter where a contagion starts, we are all essentially the same in our vulnerabilities, and thus in our responsibilities. Scapegoating another group aligns our minds with authoritarianism. First, we believe a tyrant who tells us that we are immune because we are innocent and superior; then, when we get sick, we believe that we must have been unfairly attacked by someone else, since we are innocent and superior. The tyrant who lied to us about our immunity and superiority then tries to gather power from our suffering and resentment. When Mr. Trump invokes an “Invisible Enemy” when closing borders, or refers to the coronavirus as “Chinese,” he takes part in a tradition that confuses and kills.
China does bear responsibility for ignoring the reality of the outbreak. Yet American policy was to repeat China’s mistakes, after China had made them, and for a far longer time. For that only Americans can be blamed.
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Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and other men who founded this country were participants in the Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century expression of confidence that human life could be understood through the study of nature. A motto of the Enlightenment was “dare to know.” Some of the most valiant people who followed that motto were the men and women of the nineteenth century who overturned folk wisdom and explained the principles of contagion. Their breakthroughs led to public hygiene and mandatory vaccination, two developments that are largely responsible for the extension of human life in the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, enlightenment can be undone. The fact that we can all be infected, and the consequence that we should all be checked, take courage to face. Mr. Trump lacked courage, and too many of us followed his lead. Knowledge about the world (for example, the number, location, and identity of infected people) can help us to manage the world’s ruthlessness (for example, an exponential rate of infection). If we do not accept that we are part of nature, we cannot govern and we cannot live. Untested people were more likely to die, and more likely to spread the disease so that others died. Governors and mayors deprived of basic data about their constituents made decisions too late.
Once politicians embrace ignorance and death, their next move is to bluster and blame. Journalists who ask the right questions and local leaders who act to save lives must be ostracized, because they reveal authoritarians as cowards. Politicians who summon mass death with their own actions, as Mr. Trump did, will present it as inevitable, not their fault, the work of enemies, and then apportion the dying in a way that suits them. Death, and the fear of death, become political resources. Rather than extending health care to all, a tyrant will watch people die, and try to stay in power by riding the roiling emotions of the survivors. In America, the people who died first and fastest were African Americans, who as a rule did not vote for Mr. Trump.
A tyrant sees malady as opportunity, presenting himself as the rightful arbiter of life and death. Mr. Trump made it clear that resources purchased with taxpayers’ money would be distributed according to governors’ loyalty to him. The federal government retreated from the massacre it had caused, telling the states to fight it out amongst themselves for medical resources. This needless competition drove up the prices of medical equipment and safety gear, making matters worse. Governors who tried to save lives were called disloyal. African Americans kept dying at catastrophic rates.
The Department of Justice requested the authority to detain any American without trial; meanwhile, it dropped charges against a man close to the president who had already pleaded guilty. Mr. Trump fired inspectors general across the federal government under cover of the pandemic, placing the rule of law in question and inviting corruption into the very center of public life. In April 2020, the pandemic was used to suppress votes in Wisconsin. An election that might have been delayed was forced, after decisions of the state and federal supreme courts, to take place with the vast majority of urban polling stations closed. This cast a shadow on elections to follow. Mr. Trump opined that the problem with unimpeded voting is that “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” He decried voting by mail, although he himself votes by mail. In April, Mr. Trump encouraged Americans to violently overthrow (“liberate”) their state governments. In May, an African American named George Floyd, who had suffered from coronavirus and lost his job during the epidemic, was killed by a Minneapolis policeman. In the worst tradition of tyrants, Mr. Trump threatened military intervention to halt the protests that followed.
Our failure during a public health crisis is a sign of how far our democracy has declined. As we have hastened along the road to authoritarianism during the Trump administration, we have placed not only our liberties but our lives at risk. Democracies where law is respected and the press is robust respond better to pandemics than do authoritarian regimes. The combination of free speaking and free voting allows citizens to report what their rulers are doing, and to replace the ones who lie about matters of life and death. When democracy is limited, citizens die. One of the limits on our democracy is the vast and unregulated presence of money in politics, which means that in times of crisis private equity firms and insurance companies get more of a voice in matters of life and death than patients and doctors.