It has been a punishing last week for the White House as some of the biggest guns in American journalism have taken aim at President Donald Trump’s failed leadership in the COVID-19 crisis.
The reckoning started last weekend with a major piece from the New York Times titled “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus.” NPR followed up on April 13 with a “Morning Edition” report titled, “A Month After Emergency Declaration, Trump’s Promises Largely Unfulfilled.” It’s a devastating catalog of promises made, promises not kept by the president of the United States.
And now comes “Frontline,” the PBS powerhouse of investigations and long-form TV journalism, with a report debuting Tuesday night titled “Coronavirus Pandemic.” The guns here are not primarily trained on Trump and his inner circle of decision-makers. “Frontline” clearly set out first and foremost to chronicle the history of the virus that has torn up American life as we knew it. But in telling the story of the first known COVID-19 patient and how the virus came to Washington state in January, “Frontline” could not help but also document what was not being done in the other Washington as Trump ignored warnings from health experts and then publicly denied the massive threat to human life and the American economy that the virus posed.
“Frontline” nails Trump’s negligence with its contextualized timeline and video of the president’s own words. But the real power of this documentary comes from going back and retracing the steps of Patient One in the U.S., and talking to the doctor who treated him, George Diaz, as well as an array of health experts and political leaders in the Seattle area.
The nation’s current plight of insufficient COVID-19 tests, lack of enough protective gear for medical workers and inability to properly gauge how many people really are infected due to lack of testing is made all the more painful in seeing that local leaders in Seattle and Washington state had a solid sense of the impending disaster and plans for dealing with it at the local level. It makes you wonder how much that same kind of effort at the national level could have mitigated the suffering and death that now so cruelly grips this nation.
“I arrived in Seattle in mid-March, a city and state shutting down before that was the norm in the rest of the country,” correspondent Miles O’Brien says in voiceover at the start. “I’ve covered science stories for nearly 30 years. But this felt more like science fiction. The deadly disease, COVID-19, was about to bring the country and the world to their knees. … How did it evade our best warning systems, our best science? Why was our government so slow to act, so unprepared? And what lies ahead?”
Patient One was admitted to the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash., on Jan. 20, after testing positive for the virus. He had just returned to the Seattle area from Wuhan, China, where he had been the previous six weeks.
One of the reasons Diaz and his team were so focused and quick to understand what they were potentially dealing with in Patient One is that “less than three weeks earlier they had conducted an elaborate simulation pandemic training,” O’Brien says in the report.
Think of that the next time Trump says, “No one saw this coming.” In early January, medical personnel in Washington state were training and preparing for pandemic related procedures and treatment.
Detection of the first case was “a critical early warning sign that coronavirus could be spreading in the U.S.,” O’Brien says. “But in his first public comments, President Donald Trump dismissed any threat to the rest of the country.”
Trump is shown on videotape being asked, “Have you been briefed by the CDC?”
“Yes, I have,” he says.
“Are you worried about a pandemic?”
“No, we’re not at all,” Trump says. “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. And we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
While Washington under the leadership of Gov. Jay Inslee was the first state to declare a state of emergency over the coronavirus, the governor voiced his concern about Trump continuing to downplay the threat nationally.
Inslee tweeted that he had told Vice President Mike Pence “our work would be more successful if the Trump administration stuck to the science and told the truth.”
Trump’s response came during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on March 6: “I told Mike not to be complimentary of the governor, because that governor is a snake. OK? Inslee. Let me just tell you … I said no matter how nice you are, he’s no good. That’s the way I feel. Goodbye.”
That is one of the places in the “Frontline” report where the two Washington story lines intersect and illuminate each other. I did not appreciate that contrast of the two responses until seeing this report.
The president was still insisting everything was under control during that session at the CDC. But nothing at the federal level was anywhere near under control at that time.
Trump was at the CDC trying to rewrite history about another disastrous decision made by his administration, which the “Frontline” report explores. This one was to not use a German test for the virus that was being offered by the World Health Organization. Instead Team Trump opted to go with a test developed at the CDC that proved to be badly flawed when the testing kits were shipped out and tried by recipients. (The CDC claims it has fixed the problem.)
Anybody that wants a test can get a test,” Trump said during that CDC photo op.
That is still a lie today. And it is impossible to estimate the damage in lives and money lost by going with those flawed homegrown tests instead of the ones from the World Health Organization.
It is important that the best journalistic institutions we have are writing and filming this first draft of the history of the COVID-19 pandemic even as they provide all-hands-on-deck daily coverage of what certainly feels like the largest and most threatening event in American life since World War II.
Trump’s obsession with rewriting the history of this crisis is on display for some two hours every day at the White House podium as he rambles, lies, fumes at the press and offers dangerous misinformation about matters of health. Tens of thousands of Americans have already died as a result of COVID-19, yet Trump seems far more focused on controlling the narrative of his performance than the death and destruction caused by the virus.
“Frontline’s” special “Coronavirus Pandemic,” with its strong and careful reporting on medical and political choices made at the very start of the crisis in both Washingtons, not only makes for powerful nonfiction storytelling today, but also provides an essential document from which later drafts of history will be written.
Trump could stand at the White House podium for two hours a day for the next hundred years trying to sell his version of events, and I don’t think he has a chance of winning against honest, fact-based productions like “Coronavirus Pandemic” and parallel accounts from the New York Times, NPR and other major journalistic institutions of American life.
Spin on, Mr. President. Spin on.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
David Zurawik is the Baltimore Sun’s media critic. Email: david.zurawik@baltsun.com; Twitter: @davidzurawik.
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