to protect the president’s ego.

Trump’s Calamitous Coronavirus Response

A whole-of-government mobilization to protect the president’s ego.
By Michelle Goldberg

Last month, after analyzing figures on epidemics since 1960, The Economist concluded that people die at a higher rate from such disease outbreaks in authoritarian countries than in democratic ones, even controlling for income levels.

This might seem counterintuitive. Autocratic societies have an easier time imposing strict behavioral limits than democratic ones; it’s hard to imagine Italy locking down Milan the way China closed off Wuhan. Without the messy deliberations of democracy, certain kinds of infrastructure can be scaled up much more quickly. “In Norway, one of the most democratic countries in the world, lawmakers have been debating the location of a new 200-bed hospital for seven years,” according to the article in The Economist. “In China, a new 1,000-bed hospital to treat coronavirus patients was recently built in just ten days.”

But democratic countries are far better than authoritarian ones at fact-based policymaking and at sharing the truth with the public. “Non-democratic societies often restrict the flow of information and persecute perceived critics,” The Economist piece noted. We’ve seen this in China. As Li Yuan wrote of coronavirus in The Times last month, “As the virus spread, officials in Wuhan and around the country withheld critical information, played down the threat and rebuked doctors who tried to raise the alarm.”

Unfortunately, you could substitute “Washington, D.C.” for “Wuhan” in that sentence and it would be equally true. So far, Donald Trump’s response to coronavirus combines the worst features of autocracy and of democracy, mixing opacity and propaganda with leaderless inefficiency.