The president is continually more focused on good numbers than good policy.
Rallying the faithful in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday night, President Trump opined that “testing is a double-edged sword,” explaining that “when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people; you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down please.’”
The president confessing to a deliberate effort to sabotage Covid-19 testing would, of course, be a huge scandal, so his senior staff immediately began explaining that he was just joking. But on Tuesday in an impromptu interview, Trump said, “I don’t kid,” and in a tweet that morning he reiterated what appears to be his real view, which is that whether or not he has actually been sabotaging testing, he kind of wishes he was because all case growth, in his opinion, is an artifact of testing.
Cases are going up in the U. S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!
This is not accurate. Not only has the raw count of positive tests started to rise again, the share of tests that are positive has also begun to rise. And in certain key states, hard numbers like hospitalizations are also on the way up. But Trump’s clinging to this talking point and his ambivalent feelings about tests are anything but a joke — they’ve been a characteristic element of his catastrophic leadership failure from the early days of the crisis.
In the earliest days of the outbreak in the United States, Trump quipped that he didn’t really want to see sick passengers onboard the Grand Princess cruise ship come ashore for treatment because “I like the numbers where they are.”
Like his most recent line, that was, on some level, a joke. And his administration bowed to medical expertise and brought the US citizens on the ship to shore. But a person makes a joke over and over and over again to express something real — in Trump’s case, he doesn’t like to make policy changes that generate statistics that reflect poorly on him.
In early March, when America’s testing capacity was plainly inadequate, Trump spent a lot of time touting the allegedly low case numbers rather than focusing on improving testing to get a handle on the situation. Indeed, the very same day as he made the Grand Princess quip, he infamously insisted that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” when this was obviously untrue.
