During the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing on Tuesday, the team presented an estimate that the virus will kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans. When asked how much the lower the bottom figure could be if the entire country implemented full mitigation measures, President Donald Trump’s response was “What would have happened if we did nothing?”
That rhetorical deflection avoids acknowledging his administration didn’t act soon enough. And the person most responsible for that tragic miscalculation is Vice President Mike Pence.
In May 2018, the widely respected conservative columnist George Will called Pence “America’s most repulsive public figure.” Because as the “authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party” Pence clarifies” that voting Republican is “to ratify groveling as governing.”
On Wednesday, Pence took that act to CNN, where he told Wolf Blitzer “I don’t believe the president has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus.”
But five weeks earlier, when Pence was being named to head the task force, he shared the podium when Trump downplayed the threat.
At the time there were only 15 confirmed cases in the country. “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low” Trump proclaimed. He went on to predict “within a couple of days” there would be “close to zero” cases.
The number of similarly dismissive statements Trump made during the prior month and next few weeks are well-documented and too numerous to recap here. Pence’s refusal to acknowledge any of them fits the pattern of misguided flattery that Will condemned him for two years ago.
One of the reasons his behavior is dangerous in the aura he projects. Where Trump often sounds like an armchair politician, Pence appears presidential. Over time, it’s had the effect of helping many Americans interpret the president’s careless statements as credible opinions. Now, it’s made this crisis more deadly.
Imagine how different the White House response would have been had the outbreak of the virus occurred exactly three years earlier.
In 2016, the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment included a warning that infectious diseases, including coronaviruses, “can quickly pose regional or global threats.”
With reports coming out of China about a novel coronavirus, outgoing national intelligence officials would have been extremely alarmed and properly briefed the new national security team that included Pence.
Trump would have been in office only 10 days when the World Health Organization declared it a global health emergency. Even if he insisted on being the voice of the response, his health and national security experts would have ensured Congress and the American people were told the facts.
The 2016 warning obviously wasn’t a pessimistic outlook. Similar ones appeared in the next three annual assessments. The 2019 report stated the country was “vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability.”
The 2020 report, which normally would be published in February, has likely been delayed because of the coronavirus outbreak. But information available to Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, allowed him to tell an audience at a private luncheon that it’s “probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic” than anything in recent history.
Burr made that remark the same day Trump said the 15 cases were trending toward zero.
Pence had access to the same information. To claim he read it differently than Burr would be to admit he isn’t competent to command the Coronavirus Task Force.
The more likely explanation is three years of groveling left him unable to effectively challenge Trump’s less-qualified judgments. And by the time this crisis arrived, it allowed an inadequately informed president to ignore the collective wisdom of the experts in his administration, take control of the government’s response, and badly mislead the American people.
“Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic” Will wrote two years ago. “Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.”
No one could have prevented the coronavirus from reaching America and spreading. But this administration failed to take decisive action that could have contained it more effectively and reduce the loss of life. And Pence lacks the moral courage to tell Americans that truth.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.
