Trump Minimizes Virus Threat as Reelection Campaign Intensifies

Seven days after leaving coronavirus isolation, President Donald Trump had settled into a new rhythm: one built on insisting the worst had passed, that Americans should stop listening to warnings, that the virus itself was being overstated by people he dismissed as cynics and partisan pessimists. The shift was unmistakable. Gone were the daily White House briefings where Trump stood flanked by members of his coronavirus task force, the impromptu visits from Vice President Mike Pence and other officials bringing him updates fresh from their meetings. The White House declined to say when the president had last sat down with the task force at all.

On a Friday in Fort Myers, Florida, Trump told a crowd of supporters that the light at the end of the tunnel was visible, that the country was rounding the corner. This became his refrain through a week of campaigning—a determined effort to minimize a virus that had already killed more than 215,000 Americans and was complicating his path to a second term. The timing was striking. Infections were spiking across Europe. Public health officials in the United States were warning that the nation was climbing toward a new peak. The country was averaging more than 50,000 new cases daily. Yet Trump's message remained one of optimism, delivered without a mask, often surrounded by aides who also refused to wear one.

The disconnect between what Trump was saying and what the data showed had grown stark. The economy remained roughly 11 million jobs short of recovering the 22 million positions lost when the pandemic struck in early spring. National and battleground polls suggested he faced significant headwinds in his reelection bid. Democrats were framing the race as a referendum on his handling of the worst public health crisis in over a century. And yet Trump was doubling down—spreading claims about masks that contradicted a CDC study he misrepresented, undermining Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, and using his own son's positive diagnosis as evidence that the virus posed little threat to young people.

Olivia Troye, a former aide to the task force who had become one of Trump's harshest critics on the pandemic, watched this unfold with alarm. Early in the crisis, she said, Trump had asked reasonable questions when doctors briefed him about the possibility of a fall and winter surge. But after contracting COVID-19 himself, he had reversed course entirely. "He's doubling down on misinformation," Troye said, describing his refusal to wear masks and his claims of immunity as reckless. At an NBC town hall, when asked whether he should have known better than to hold a Rose Garden ceremony for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett—an indoor event where few wore masks and social distancing was abandoned—Trump responded by falsely claiming a CDC study showed masks don't prevent virus spread. The study said no such thing.

Trump also remained guarded about his own health, refusing to say whether he had tested negative before his first debate with Joe Biden, two days before his positive diagnosis. When First Lady Melania Trump revealed that their son Barron had tested positive, the president used the boy's illness and recovery to argue the virus was inconsequential for young people. "It happens," he said at a rally in Iowa. "Get the kids back to school." Meanwhile, he took aim at Fauci, musing aloud at a North Carolina rally that the doctor was "a nice guy so I keep him around," before suggesting Fauci was a Democrat and a friend of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—characterizations that ignored Fauci's long record of nonpartisan service.

The absence of masks on the campaign trail had become policy. Senior adviser Hope Hicks, who had tested positive more than two weeks earlier, returned to traveling with Trump and boarded Marine One with the president and other aides—none wearing masks. Trump defended the practice by saying doctors had told him he was no longer shedding virus and would remain immune for at least four months. Public health experts pushed back. Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University, argued that as president, Trump had an obligation to model safe behavior. "If you're not wearing a mask, people that support you won't be wearing a mask," Gostin said.

The political calculus was becoming visible in other quarters too. Dan Eberhart, a prominent Republican donor and Trump supporter, said the president's pandemic rhetoric since leaving the hospital wasn't reassuring conservative contributors. Several GOP senators in tight reelection races were struggling to keep pace with a surge of Democratic donations driven partly by liberal anger over Trump's handling of the crisis. "Keeping up the veneer that everything is fine may soothe the president's ego, but it isn't motivating donors," Eberhart said. Behind the scenes, tensions simmered on the task force itself. Dr. Scott Atlas, a science adviser who had no background in public health or infectious diseases, was promoting theories around herd immunity and resisting calls for mask-wearing—positions that other professional scientists on the task force saw as dangerous and as reinforcing Trump's instincts. Neither Dr. Fauci nor Dr. Deborah Birx, the task force coordinator, had appeared publicly with Trump in months. As recently as Friday, Fauci contradicted the president directly, saying he was concerned about Trump's repeated claims that the country was rounding the corner. The data, Fauci suggested, told a different story.

Troye summed up what she saw as the fundamental problem: Trump was showing "complete disregard for the truth, science, and facts" in service of his reelection. "I don't know that Donald Trump can see past the current moment," she said. The question hanging over the final weeks of the campaign was whether that myopia would matter—and to whom.