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How Coronavirus Is Already Being Viewed Through a Partisan Lens
Public health officials say that injecting politics into the growing outbreak could make it harder to fight.
By Jack Healy, Campbell Robertson and
Rob Maness, a Republican commentator, recently wrote a column, outlining his concerns about how the coronavirus outbreak could disrupt supplies of medicine. He was not ready for the backlash — from his fellow conservatives.
“I got accused of being alarmist and trying to hurt the president,” said Mr. Maness, a staunch President Trump supporter, describing the response on social media. “I actually said the government’s doing a pretty good job.”
The coronavirus does not discriminate between political parties. But as Mr. Trump and his allies have defended his actions and accused Democrats and the news media of fanning fears to “bring down the president,” a growing public health crisis has turned into one more arena for bitter political battle, where facts are increasingly filtered through a partisan lens. Democrats accused Mr. Trump of failing to respond adequately to the health threat and then politicizing it instead.
At a rally on Friday in South Carolina, Mr. Trump called Democrats’ concerns about coronavirus “their new hoax,” reprising a term he used to dismiss his impeachment and the special-counsel investigation into Russian election interference. He walked that back somewhat the next day, saying he wasn’t claiming the coronavirus was a hoax. But unlike other political fights, this one is a matter of public health. And some scientists and officials say they are worried that sparring over a growing outbreak, which has now spread to California, Oregon, Washington State and Rhode Island could undermine the public’s trust in government responses or even goad skeptics into dismissing any real threats as Fake News.
“If the public perceives that issues regarding communicable diseases are influenced by political considerations, they will lose confidence in the information,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University. “That will be to the detriment of all of us.”
Already, the partisanship has seeped into how many Americans, in particular Mr. Trump’s supporters, view the crisis.
In interviews across the country, several dismissed Democrats’ concerns about whether the United States was prepared to handle the growing outbreak.
“It’s been a three-year witch hunt, three years they’ve been trying to get this guy out of office,” said Doug Davis, 57, a former concrete form builder in western Pennsylvania who wished that Mr. Trump had shut down the border completely. “You know as well as I do it’s garbage — everything they’ve brought up.”
There are few brakes on the rhetoric. When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday if he defended remarks by Donald Trump Jr. that Democrats seemingly hope the virus comes to the United States and “kills millions of people” so they could bring down the president, Vice President Mike Pence declined to condemn them. Instead, he said they were “understandable” given the criticism directed at his father.
Last week a government whistle-blower said federal employees interacted with quarantined Americans without proper medical training or protective gear, then scattered into the general population. Democratic lawmakers said the whistle-blower faced retaliation after these concerns were shared.
Conservative commentators have, as ever, rushed to Mr. Trump’s side, praising the administration’s response and dismissing fears as a media-hyped overreaction. They have labeled Democrats “The Pandemic Party.”
Some public-health experts and elected officials who have handled outbreaks said Mr. Trump’s tirades against Democrats and his boasts that the United States was “way ahead” and “totally prepared” for an unpredictable contagion were undercutting statements from the administration’s own health experts.
Katherine Foss, a media studies professor at Middle Tennessee State University who has written a book on the how the media has covered past American epidemics, said the public needs credible, useful information during a health crisis.
She said Mr. Trump’s attempts to minimize the threat posed by the coronavirus was a dramatic departure from the way most political figures have approached past health emergencies
“We’ve never had a political leader say stuff like this,” she said.
But, she added, “at the same what we can’t do is just have media messages that focus on his words and not address practical things that people can do,” concrete information that she said everyone, Trump supporters and critics alike, are hungry for.
That national outlets may be more alarmist and politicized than local ones is common to nearly every epidemic she has studied. But what sets this one apart from most of those is that it is unfolding on Facebook and Twitter as well.
“The most alarming messages have come from just people speculating on social media and other people taking that as fact,” she said.
Already, a number of Democratic voters said they had little confidence in Mr. Trump’s public statements.
“I don’t think he gives a damn,” said Shelli Hunt, 62, a saleswoman for a cable company in Las Vegas who voted for Bernie Sanders in last month’s Democratic caucuses. “It’s all about the spin. If he spent half of the energy he does running the country that he does into tweeting and blaming people, we’d be in a lot better shape.”
Other experts questioned whether Mr. Trump has the credibility to guide the country through a public-health crisis given his history of making false claims. After Hurricane Maria shattered Puerto Rico in 2017 leaving thousands homeless or without power for months, Mr. Trump hailed himself in 2019 as “the best thing that’s ever happened to Puerto Rico” and disputed the official estimates that about 3,000 people died because of the storm.
As mayor of Dallas in 2014, Mike Rawlings led the city’s response to an Ebloa outbreak when two nurses tested positive for the deadly virus. He said he had tried to maintain public confidence by holding regular briefings and being honest about delivering bad news.
“I hope the governors and the mayors focus on what needs to be done, ” he said. “We’ve all got to be a team. This is hard work. We don’t have time for politics. People may die.”
Mr. Trump was a harsh critic of President Obama’s response to the Ebola outbreak.
In deeply Republican areas where President Trump still enjoys strong support, health officials said they are trying to focus less on the political storm, and more how they could prepare schools and hospitals for coronavirus as they tried to tamp down fears and dispel falsehoods.
In Mesa County, Colo., public-health teams are running coronavirus scenarios with hospitals while fielding the occasional question about whether it is safe to eat at an Asian restaurant (Yes, of course it is). Alabama health officials, on edge, are sending out information sheets to schools. In Mississippi, state health officials are giving outbreak presentations to county leaders and chambers of commerce.
“Some of the social media stuff certainly has gotten people all wound up and every new sensational story gets people twisted into knots,” said Dr. Thomas Dobbs, the Mississippi state health officer. But, he went on, “we know those things that are likely to be most effective and we just need to make sure people look at those things rationally.”
Darrell Scott, a Cleveland pastor who also serves as co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, has set up stations with hand sanitizer at his church and is encouraging congregants to say hello with a fist bump, not a handshake. He believes Mr. Trump has handled the threat capably.
“What’s sad is that the Democrats are politicizing something that we should all be uniting to fight,” Mr. Scott said. “The Democrats are acting as if the president should have gone on TV and declared a state of emergency,” Mr. Scott added. “If he had, they’d have said he should have been calm.”
But Steve DeKoster, 65, a real-estate agent in Grand Rapids, Mich., who voted for Mr. Trump, saw a more nuanced picture. He agreed that there were people on television who were using the virus to take shots at Mr. Trump, but at the same time, he said “we just don’t know how hard it’s going to hit us.”
Mr. DeKoster’s daughter has tickets to visit Milan, Italy and has been in daily contact with friends there about whether she should make the trip, given the virus outbreak there.
“Like everything, it’s complicated,” he said.
Jack Healy reported from Denver, Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh and Sabrina Tavernise from Madison, Wis. Elizabeth Dias contributed reporting from Washington.
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