Nobody can pretend to know how President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis will unfold, but some fallout for U.S. national security will be impossible to avoid. What sort of distortions will the illness introduce to foreign policy? That’s harder to say. The Trump administration, after all, has had no baseline of normalcy from which to estimate such deviations. Nevertheless, four potential issues stand out.
First, and most consequentially, Trump could change his mind about the seriousness of the virus—as other infected political leaders have—and work closely with Democrats to mitigate COVID-19’s multiple harms. With the virus representing the most acute and lethal threat facing Americans, reducing its cumulative impacts should be the top national security concern for the commander in chief. Moreover, the interventions required to reduce those immediate and long-term harms have been well known and could be adapted quickly if the president expended the requisite political capital. In a video tweeted from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Trump even revealed he “learned a lot about COVID.” He added: “I get it. And I understand it. And it’s a very interesting thing.”
