Policy Brief

October 2020

The Coronavirus and the Trump Administration

Summary of findings
 This study shows the way the Trump Presidency has downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic.
 The action against the pandemic resulted in the United States being the country with more reported cases than any other
industrialized nation.
 The Trump administration response, lead into a weakening the country’s capability, delayed federal action, and the denigrated
the scientific community

Introduction Equipment (PPE). His role had a “bump effect” which

At the end of 2019 a newly discovered disease in Wuhan,
China has been discovered by local Chinese authorities, the
virus first started to spread inside China. The Chinese
government was slow in reporting the outbreak to the
World Health Organization (WHO), and it resisted full
transparency thereafter and rejected any claims from the
WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) to provide desperately needed scientific
expertise in epidemiology and molecular virology (Stewart,
2020).
Summary of Research
In the initial weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, there were
more than 15 million posts on twitter about the seriousness of
the situation; afterwards the amount of posts related to the
COVID-19 was over 417 million (Pérez-Dasilva, Meso-Ayerdi, &
Mendiguren-Galdospín, 2020). The latter is worth mentioning
because twitter is one of the main platforms where President
Trump gives his statements and influences people.
Not only that, the Trump administration downplayed the
seriousness of the pandemic and took minimal preventive
actions during the early stages of the pandemic. The United
States, having around a 4 percent of the world’s population, was
having more reported cases than any other industrialized
country, the same way, it started to lead with the COVID-19
death tolls (Drezner, 2020).
With Donald Trump’s denial of responsibility, there was a late
action in testing Americans if whether or not they had the virus
as well as the lack of acquisition of Personal Protection
explained by Erlanger in his post in the New York Times as
“when people are confused and afraid, they tend to trust
their governments, because to think that the authorities are
themselves confused and afraid, let alone incompetent, is
too much to bear” (Ladkin, 2020).
The complication of the handling of the COVID-19 has given
the result that more Americans are dying because of it
(Ladkin, 2020). The Trump Administration decided to dismiss
the advice on pandemic preparedness given by the previous
administration by disbanding the pandemic response office
as part of an effort to streamline NSC operations (Rutledge,
2020). What was done is that Trump and his administration
decided to change the nation’s pandemic response, leading
into a weakening into the country’s capability, delayed
federal action, and the denigrated the scientific community
(Yamey & Gonsalves, 2020).
Research Findings
To sum up, it has been evidently that President Trump’s
downplaying of the situation has been impactful to the
American people, let alone himself, where in the recent days
he has been diagnosed with the COVID-19. A proof of what
is stated above is the latest presidential debate held on
September 29th, 2020, where Trump mocked his rival Joe
Biden for using a face mask, he also questioned the experts’
opinions on the effectivity of masks. Likewise, with the
medical discharge and still being carrier of the virus, Trump
decided to take off his mask demonstrating once again that
he does not acknowledge the seriousness of the situation.

References
1. Drezner, D. (2020, August 19). The Song Remains the Same: International Relations After COVID-19. The IO Foundation, 1-18.
doi:10.1017/S0020818320000351
2. Ladkin, D. (2020). What Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19 teaches us: It’s time for our romance with leaders to end. Leadership, 3, 273-278.
3. Pérez-Dasilva, J. Á., Meso-Ayerdi, K., & Mendiguren-Galdospín, T. (08 de May de 2020). Fake news and coronavirus: Detecting key players and trends through
analysis of Twitter conversations. El profesional de la información, 1-22.
4. Rutledge, P. (2020). Trump, COVID-19, and the War on Expertise. American Review of Public Administration, 50(6/7), 505-511.
5. Stewart, P. (2020). When the System Fails. Foreign Affairs, 99(4), 40-51.
6. Yamey, G., & Gonsalves, G. (2020, April 24). Donald Trump: a political determinant of covid-19. The BMJ, 369.