Then-President Donald Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic last year has already secured his place among the worst presidents in America’s history. The one bright spot in the entire tragic debacle was his administration’s speed in developing vaccines against the coronavirus. Now, in a sorry postscript that severely undermines that achievement, Trump says he will likely refuse the recommended vaccine booster, with the bizarre claim that it’s some kind of for-profit scam.
As president when the worst global pandemic in a century arose in early 2020, Trump’s response was a disastrous mix of wishful thinking, science denial and misinformation. Even as his government’s own experts warned that the few U.S. cases early on would quickly bloom into a national epidemic, Trump, obsessed with protecting his economic record, publicly predicted the virus would disappear on its own, “like a miracle.” When the numbers instead exploded, he took to baselessly challenging both the official death counts and the experts’ advice.
He resisted the societal shutdowns that doctors said were needed to contain the spread. He bickered with desperate governors instead of providing them with coherent leadership, sometimes even threatening to withhold federal help from states that had displeased him. He refused to set an example by masking in public, and conducted large, maskless rallies that became superspreader events. He promoted quack cures that included disinfectant and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. If Trump’s goal had been to make the pandemic as devastating as possible, it’s difficult to imagine what he would have done differently.
