Donald Trump's "playing down" of the seriousness of the Coronavirus was not just incompetence. It bordered on criminality. That's the opinion of economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. Trump said he didn't want to cause a panic. That's probably true, but it wasn't the American public he didn't want to panic -- it was the stock market.
Here is just a small part of what Krugman had to say about Trump lying about the virus in his New York Times column:
Until this week I thought that Donald Trump’s disastrous mishandling of Covid-19 was basically negligence, even if that negligence was willful — that is, that he failed to understand the gravity of the threat because he didn’t want to hear about it and refused to take actions that could have saved thousands of American lives because actually doing effective policy isn’t his kind of thing.
But I was wrong. According to Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” Trump wasn’t oblivious; he knew by early February that Covid-19 was both deadly and airborne. And this isn’t a case of conflicting recollections: Woodward has Trump on tape. Yet Trump continued to hold large indoor rallies, disparage precautionary measures and pressure states to reopen business despite the risk of infection.
And he’s still doing the same things, even now.
In other words, a large fraction of the more than 200,000 Americans who will surely die of Covid-19 by Election Day will have been victims of something much worse than mere negligence. . . .
Trump justified his concealment of Covid-19’s dangers as a desire to avoid “panic.” That’s pretty rich coming from the guy who began his presidency with warnings about “American carnage” and who’s currently trying to terrify suburbanites with visions of rampaging Antifa hordes. But what exactly were the dangers of panic that worried him?
After all, telling the truth about the coronavirus wouldn’t have been like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The only things the truth might have scared people into doing would have been staying home where possible, avoiding crowds, washing their hands and so on. And these were all things people should have been doing — in fact, once people started “panicking” in places like New York, infection rates came way down.
Of course, we all have a pretty good idea what Trump was actually talking about: All through this crisis credible sources have reported that he wanted to downplay the crisis out of fear that bad news might hurt his beloved stock market. That is, he felt that he needed to sacrifice thousands of American lives to prop up the Dow.
As it happens, he was wrong: Stocks have stayed high despite an ever-rising death toll. But the fact that he was wrong about the trade-off doesn’t alter the fact that his willingness to make that trade-off was utterly immoral.
The bottom line is that it’s wrong to say that Trump mishandled Covid-19, that his response was incompetent. No, it wasn’t; it was immoral, bordering on criminal.
