Trump and Putin's Pandemic Duet: Trump's America

Is Far More out of Tune

csis.org/analysis/trump-and-putins-pandemic-duet-trumps-america-far-more-out-tune

August 21, 2020

What do Texas and Sverdlovsk have in common? Remarkably, quite a bit. They’re both
large, diverse, economically vital areas of their countries just emerging from a
completely avoidable second wave of coronavirus infection that has ripped through
society, imposed special cruelties upon racial minorities and the poor, bent health
systems to the breaking point, and exposed failures of leadership. And they are case
studies of the ways the U.S. and Russian responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have been
eerily, and disastrously, similar.

Russian president Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump share a playbook that
has led each country into deep turmoil. But Trump has also travelled well beyond the
commonalities—in terms of his abdication of leadership, generating chaos and
incoherence; the assault upon science and U.S. public health institutions; and the
politicization of the pandemic response. As a consequence, the scale, scope, and velocity
of the U.S. outbreak far outstrips Russia’s (and the rest of the world’s), as does the
staggering loss of life. U.S. prestige and influence have suffered. The United States has
entered a world of trouble far beyond anything Russia faces today.

The United States has over one-quarter of the globe’s total cases, around 5.5 million,
and average deaths have exceeded 1,000 per day for over three weeks running. The
pandemic has officially claimed over 170,000 lives in the United States and almost
16,000 in Russia, though these reported numbers likely undercount the virus’s true toll.
The United States is on course to top 300,000 deaths by year’s end. Russia currently
has the fourth-largest reported Covid-19 caseload in the world, almost 1 million, behind
only the United States, Brazil, and India. Its daily incidence has slowly declined over the
last two months, currently registering around 5,000 new cases per day.

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Trump and Putin’s Shared Harmony
Both countries observed the initial outbreak in China in January and had ample time to
prepare as China enacted an unprecedented, forcible lockdown of 150 million people
over a 70-day period. But each let that opportunity pass, refusing to take early, decisive
action, as many of China’s neighbors in Asia did. Each instead chose denial,
obfuscation, and delay. Each favored late, partial measures that were subsequently
relaxed prematurely.

As the pandemic unfolded, both Trump and Putin confronted clear challenges to their
rule—impeachment in the U.S. Congress and opposition to Putin’s quest to alter the
Russian Constitution to significantly extend his presidency. Each chose to minimize the
Covid-19 threat and assert they had nipped it in the bud with early flight bans and
border controls. These measures looked tough on paper but proved porous in practice
and ignored the reality that Covid-19 was already silently coursing through their
respective societies. It took too long for either Putin or Trump to get even marginally
serious about testing and other response measures essential to get ahead of the
pandemic.

In both the United States and Russia, the pandemic hit first in large urban areas—
Moscow and St. Petersburg, Seattle and New York—but more recently, accelerating
community transmission has brought the virus to secondary urban and semi-rural
doors. Both presidents tried to slough off responsibility when things got rough. Trump’s
approach, described by White House officials as the “state authority handoff,”
deliberately shifted broad authority—as well as blame if things went badly—to
governors and mayors. This strategic retreat, initiated in the middle of April, abdicated
federal lead responsibility to coordinate supply chains, deliver testing, and ensure the
capacity to test, trace, isolate, and quarantine; exploited misleadingly rosy disease

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models; and ultimately enabled scores of ongoing viral “embers” across the South and
Southwest to burst into runaway wildfires, generating almost 2 million cases in July
alone.

Putin traveled an analogous road from the moment the first cases were confirmed in
Russia, appearing oddly passive and disinterested during a handful of nationally
televised addresses in late April and early May and passing the buck to lower-level
authorities. Competent, charismatic local leaders have fought back as the plague
unfolded in New York City and Moscow; Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin is now
routinely dubbed “Russia’s Andrew Cuomo.”

In both cases, emergency government assistance has conspicuously favored big business
and flagrantly and callously disfavored many low-income and blue-collar workers on
the edge of poverty and desperation. The near-total absence of centralized leadership
has generated an unprecedented need for neighbor-to-neighbor support, with cars
lining up for miles at local food banks across the United States and nongovernmental
organizations mobilizing with lifelines for health workers, the homeless, and other
vulnerable groups throughout Russia. Marginalized workers have been similarly,
disproportionately placed at high risk of the disease: meatpackers in the United States
and migrant laborers in Russia, in both cases largely first- or second-generation
immigrants from often-derided neighboring countries. And although racial disparities
in access to health care are not as pronounced in Russia as they are in the United States,
Covid-19 has hit some of Russia’s regions dominated by non-ethnic-Russian, Muslim
minorities—Dagestan, Ingushetia—particularly hard.

Whether it is Kremlin-controlled Russian television hyping the unrest in Portland,

Oregon, but ignoring unprecedented protests in Khabarovsk, or Fox News outlets trying
to expose hypocrisy in a two-second clip of Dr. Fauci sliding his mask aside to sip a beer
during the Washington Nationals home opener, media under Putin and Trump’s sway
have enabled them to skew reality toward their political goals. In both countries, the
politicization of the pandemic has opened the door to misinformation, denialism, and
conspiracy theories.

In the United States, the sirens of pro-Trump cable news and social media stoke
complacency, libertarianism, and resignation, not vigilance, discipline, and common
purpose in the use of masks, the practice of social distancing, and regular hand
washing. Young people are taking reckless risks in the return to U.S. and Russian
beaches, bars, and nightclubs. Russian retailers echo the themes of their American
counterparts: people are tired of wearing masks, employees are hot and uncomfortable
in them, there’s an overall weariness underpinning the desire to get things back to
normal.

In an effort to reopen their economies at all costs, both countries are massaging their
Covid-19 data. It’s been obvious for months that Russia is fudging its numbers, both
indirectly (via lower-level bureaucrats reporting just the good news the boss wants to
hear) and deliberately (by tallying deaths with Covid-19 separately from deaths from
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Covid-19). Cases of community-acquired pneumonia—clearly how the Russians are
categorizing much of Covid-19—are up substantially over previous years. But even the
state-controlled Russian press cannot cover up social media-based reports of still-
overwhelmed hospitals and morgues from places like Ufa and Dagestan.

President Trump, in his statements to the press, repeatedly miscasts the pandemic in
falsely optimistic terms, while condemning as “pathetic” factual statements by his own
White House public health officials about the runaway community spread in over 20
states. Disturbingly, the White House has recently transferred responsibility for Covid-
19 data collection from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to a
private sector contractor controlled more tightly by the Department of Health and
Human Services, raising questions of whether the transparency and reliability of
information available to U.S. citizens and health providers is deliberately diminishing.
This comes against the backdrop of Trump’s active, ongoing assault upon the CDC, the
world’s premier public health institution.

The U.S. testing regime has ramped up steadily since June in absolute numbers,
currently covering about 750,000 people a day, but those numbers still fall far short of
what is truly required while delays in delivering results are so severe that asymptomatic
carriers are keeping the virus circulating in some communities. Testing levels across the
wildfire U.S. states have actually begun to decline, a reflection of mounting public
frustration and fatigue in the face of long lines at testing centers and long delays in
receiving test results.

Both presidents have cast the accelerating race toward a Covid-19 vaccine in terms of
national stature and prestige, nipping around the margins of established regulatory
protocols to increase political yields. Trump continues to assert that there is likely to be
a vaccine available by the November 3 election day , all other indications
notwithstanding, feeding expectations of a pre-election “October surprise” in which
Food and Drug Administration authorities may be pressured or simply overruled to
permit the premature launch of a vaccine.

Russia is still basking in the recent glory of its August 11 “Sputnik moment,” marking
premature registration of a vaccine candidate that has not yet been subject to advanced
field trials for efficacy and safety. After having completed only phase one and two trials,
Moscow is now on the threshold of mass vaccination for high-priority health workers
and educators, a methodological sleight of hand presented as a substitute for the rigors
of true phase three testing. Other state employees are reportedly receiving letters
requiring them to get the vaccine or lose their jobs. “Trust me” is Putin’s message of
flagrant disregard for global scientific standards.

There is more to come. Vaccine opponents in the United States are already mobilizing
against a Covid-19 vaccine, playing on preexisting wariness and skepticism of vaccines
among an anxious public, declining popular trust in the country’s leadership, and
concerns that speed and politics may triumph over public health and put many citizens
at risk. Russia and the United States alike face the serious challenge that large shares of
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their citizens may refuse a vaccine in the early phases, if not beyond. We can count on
Russia to pollute the information ecosystem with the usual stream of messaging
designed to cast doubt on any vaccine’s safety and efficacy in direct contradiction to its
official aims. A similar overheated confusion in the United States can be expected from
ideological extremists in the dark web, 24/7 cable, and social media.

Where Trump Goes Off-Key

The many compelling parallels notwithstanding, Russia and the United States diverge
conspicuously in a few powerful respects. The United States’ uncontrolled outbreaks
and staggering death counts far outrace Russia’s. These American failings, unthinkable
just a short while ago, are the compound product of dysfunctionalities that are simply
not at play in Russia to the same degree: the abdication of leadership marked by
recurrent chaos and incoherence; the extreme politicization of the response, including
blatant and consistent disregard of science; a deeply divided and toxic polity, crowding
out space for social solidarity; and an inherently inequitable, fragmented health system.
Those differences convey a somber message: Russia, even with its multitude of
shortcomings, is outperforming the United States, exposing some profoundly disturbing
truths for anyone who believes in exceptional American values, resilience, and
dynamism.

No city or province in Russia is now experiencing a runaway resurgent outbreak as

extreme as what has been seen since July in the American South and Southwest, and
now increasingly in the Midwest. Over 1,000 Americans are still dying of Covid-19 every
day. Even if Russia’s numbers are fudged by a factor of two or three, and taking into
account that the U.S. population is double that of Russia, the U.S. death toll is still an
order of magnitude higher than Russia’s.

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Most Russian regions have retained and extended a reasonable set of public health
measures designed to curb spread of the virus. Transmission within and between health
facilities, one of the most common problems early in Russia’s epidemic, has been largely
interrupted there. In the United States, the virus has had free rein to exploit weak local
public health infrastructure, underfinanced and short of staff after suffering a 30
percent loss of capacity in the 2008 recession.

Yes, Putin has elevated politics above public health. He is certainly no stranger to
manipulative disregard for the truth. It is his tried and true method of undermining
democracy. He cut short lockdown restrictions across the country so he could hold his
rescheduled showcase Victory Day parades celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Nazi
surrender and, more importantly, a referendum on constitutional amendments allowing
him to remain in office potentially until 2036.

But in Russia, it is a different breed of politicization. Even Putin is not willing to deny
the logic behind basic precautions against spread of the virus. No Russian leader is
turning mask rejection into a political loyalty test, complete with implicit demands that
everyone from White House staff, to partisans on Capitol Hill, to faithful supporters
across the country disregard science and logic to such an alarming degree. Nobody in
leadership positions in Russia is wielding face masks as a political weapon. Mask
wearing is not a matter of political identity there. In fact, the authorities in Moscow
have issued 5,000-ruble fines—about one-third of the average monthly salary—to more
than 40,000 people for not wearing a mask on the metro since those rules went into
effect in mid-May. In Russia, wearing a mask may be uncool, but it won’t be construed
as an act of political disloyalty.
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Putin still hews to the rule that authoritarian states ultimately have to deliver results. In
the context of a global pandemic, that means he is beholden to the imperatives of fact
and science and is consciously reliant on the state instruments of public health.

In the United States, by contrast, Trump and his allies continue to insist that everything
is normal, hoping that opening schools and opening businesses will bring electoral
gains come November. Instead, this form of public health malpractice has opened new
pathways for the spread of the virus.

Early in the pandemic, when everyone was counting respirators and scrambling for
personal protective equipment (PPE), it was widely assumed that health system
capacity—the essential institutional prerequisites for pandemic preparedness—would be
the key to beating the virus. By those kinds of measures, the United States should have
put Covid-19 in the rearview mirror months ago. The Nuclear Threat Initiative’s 2019
Global Health Security Index put the United States at the very top of its preparedness
ranking. Russia was 63rd out of 195 countries.

But we have learned that defeat of a new virus as fast and insidious as the coronavirus
requires communal spirit and shared sacrifice, actions that can only take place in an
atmosphere of widescale social trust and inspiring, effective leadership. Yes, Russia, like
the United States, has seen individual displays of appalling, selfish irresponsibility.
Russian head doctors have underreported Covid-19 cases to avoid paying promised
pandemic bonuses to their medical staffs. Corrupt Russian businessmen and their
public sector regulators have skimmed funds off the top of emergency PPE
procurements. But Russia has not embraced mass denial, deliberately engineered from
the top down. As a consequence, Russia has unquestionably fared better.

None of this absolves Putin from Russia’s abhorrent behavior in Ukraine, from
disinformation campaigns and election interference in the United States and elsewhere,
from barely concealed assassinations of political opponents at home and abroad. But it
does lay bare Washington’s profoundly inept pandemic response and Trump’s starring
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role in it. Along all three broad, interrelated dimensions of this crisis—health
infrastructure, social cohesion, and leadership—the United States has abjectly failed, in
ways that even Putin has not matched. As the United States invites global
disappointment and derision with its withdrawal from the World Health Organization
(WHO), hoarding of remdesivir, and touting of its plan to apply those same “America
First” principles to eventual Covid-19 vaccine distribution, both Russia and China stand
poised to fill the leadership vacuum.

Whoever wins the November election—be it a Biden administration or a second Trump

term—will face an inheritance of unprecedented malfeasance: damage deep and
elemental; an uncontrolled, sweeping pandemic; unthinkable numbers of Americans
dead; and a visible decline of prestige, standing, and trust. Recovery and repair will
require far more effort, for far longer, than is commonly realized. The United States’
place in the world cannot be fixed simply by restoring WHO membership, by a quick
about-face and apology for recent decisions.

For the first time in history, the rest of the world views the United States not with
respect, contempt, fear, or even bewilderment, but pity. After all our handwringing
about Putin’s deliberate attempts to weaken our basic institutions, to exacerbate
existing cleavages in our society, to subvert our global standing, who would have
thought we would end up doing it to ourselves? The U.S. and Russian pandemic
response, side-by-side: a grim comparison with uncomfortable implications for the
American position in a post-pandemic world.

Judyth Twigg is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Global Health Policy Center
and Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. J. Stephen Morrison is senior vice president and
director of the CSIS Global Health Policy Center.

The authors wish to give special thanks to Michael Rendelman and Anna Carroll for
their extensive research assistance in the development of this paper.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International

Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international
public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS
does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions,
and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be
solely those of the author(s).

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