Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID
By Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman & Thomas B. Pepinsky
Princeton University Press 2022

The three politics professors who collaborate to write Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID strike a solidly objective tone throughout their book. It’s a scholarly work – 30 pages of bibliography and 40 pages of notes – and one that consistently reminds its readers to both note and distrust the role of emotions in analyzing or even accurately recalling the world-altering outbreak of COVID-19 in the early months of 2020. This is not intended to be a hit-job on Donald Trump, the US President who oversaw the government’s response to the pandemic. There are plenty of such books, but this one is clearly intended to be a very different thing, a solid work of history attempting to assess one of the most historic events of the 21st century. 

But it’s ultimately impossible, and even by Page 3 this is unavoidable. That’s when the authors remind their readers that Trump tested positive for COVID-19 on September 26, 2020 – and kept on campaigning, unmasked, exposing hundreds of people to the virus … including candidate Joe Biden during their Cleveland debate. The authors remind their readers that he was then hospitalized at Walter Reed on October 2, received “cutting edge experimental treatment,” returned to the White House, and had himself filmed removing his face mask and telling his base not to let COVID “dominate” their lives. As the authors point out, 210,000 Americans had died of the virus by that point. 

Just on its face, this is monstrous. And of course the details only make it worse – like, for instance, that Trump and his team intentionally lied about Trump’s testing status before that debate with Biden (to avoid having the debate cancelled? To attempt to infect Biden deliberately? Out of sheer arrogance?). Or that Trump originally wanted to open his shirt upon leaving the hospital and reveal a Superman costume. Or anything else – the simple detail that he knew he was infectious and still exposed hundreds of unsuspecting people is entirely damning enough. 

Pandemic Politics meticulously charts the meeting of a horrible public health crisis and a horrible president, dispassionately noting Trump’s touchiness (the reflexive refusal of the autocratic mindset to concede the primacy of natural disasters over their own private will; drawing on a weather map in order to lie about a hurricane’s path, etc.), his perpetual vanity (smirking about his medical genius while scientists desperate for funding simpered in the background), his non-stop lying in public about the danger of the virus (while melodramatically confessing it in private to Bob Woodward), and so on. As our writing team points out, this cost the US vital, literally life-saving momentum in the early days:

With every day that he remained silent, he lost the ability to establish a narrative that could supersede the thoroughgoing partisan differences characterizing American politics. And with every day spent gaslighting Americans, telling them not to believe their own eyes and instead focus  on his own successful leadership, the pandemic became worse. By early March, the disjunction between Trump’s narrative and the pandemic reality put us through Alice’s proverbial looking glass. By the first week of March, the window of opportunity for a unified response was closed. The pandemic was already partisan.

The partisan tribalism spread as quickly as the virus. Vaccine-scaremongers like Marc Bernier, Dick Farrell, and Phil Valentine, having spent weeks convincing their audiences that the “plandemic” was a hoax concocted by Trump’s enemies, one by one contracted the virus and died of it, gasping repentance on their deathbeds. Mask-wearing and social distancing became almost exclusively political signals, as inconceivable as that seems even now, after years of it being everyday reality. “Politics made the pandemic worse than it had to be,” the writers note, “but we cannot ask for a world without politics.” True, but homicidal politics? 

One of the only inarguable bright spots in this familiar, sordid story is that of Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine-development initiative that succeeded with astonishing speed and end results. But even here, there’s no avoiding the man in the Oval Office. “Trump himself received a vaccine in January, but unlike every other world leader and most members of Congress, he did not do so publicly, thus missing a key opportunity to endorse uptake from his base,” our authors write, going on to include the depressingly predictable imbecilic paranoid lying: “He also accused Pfizer, without evidence, of deliberately waiting until after election day to release its trial results, speculating on Twitter that Democrats and even the Food and Drug Administration “didn’t want to have me get a Vaccine [sic] WIN, prior to the election.” 

It will remain impossible to calculate to a nicety the full extent of damage and loss of life that resulted from the disastrous timing of a once-in-a-century plague striking the US during the ridiculous presidency of a pathologically deceitful real estate swindler. Had Donald Trump deferred to experts (instead of claiming to be one and recommending the ingestion of household bleach), set a good example (instead of a willfully bad one), and simply stood back and championed Operation Warp Speed and common sense public preventative measures, he could have changed the course of the entire pandemic and saved many thousands of lives. 

But he didn’t do any of that. Pandemic Politics is a fine, solidly readable account of what we all got instead. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.