Three reasons Americans won't survive another Trump pandemic

Amid the hantavirus outbreak, Americans should be concerned. Trump won't just mishandle the next global health crisis. He's prepared to weaponize it.

The spread of the so-called “rat plague” from a cruise ship is stirring global health fears. In the United States, we have even more reason to worry. Our president learned the wrong lessons from the last pandemic, and if it happens again, the situation could be far worse.

A hantavirus outbreak that began on a Dutch-flagged cruise ship has now touched six U.S. states, where passengers have returned for quarantine. Americans are nervously asking the same question they asked in January 2020: Is this the big one? The answer, for now, is no. World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus traveled to the site of the cruise ship this weekend to oversee the disembarkation and told reporters, bluntly, “This is not another COVID.”

But the wider anxiety is not irrational. We’re living through the early years of an age in which the barrier to engineering a deadly, transmissible pathogen is collapsing. AI is doing to synthetic biology what the personal computer did to information. It’s lowering the floor of expertise required to do extraordinary and dangerous things. Sober researchers at major biosecurity institutions have told me the same thing in private — that the next pandemic may not come from a wet market or a bat cave in China but from a laptop.

Which raises the question Americans should be asking. What happens if another pandemic arrives on Donald Trump’s watch?

He’s been here before. And the worst thing about his first turn at pandemic management isn’t just that Trump failed. Rather, it’s that he failed so spectacularly that he learned all the wrong lessons. His “experience” has armed him with takeaways that, applied to a second crisis, could get far more people killed than the million-plus Americans whose deaths he already bears partial responsibility for.

Let me tell you why.

FIRST, Trump broke the pandemic response system. And it remains broken.

When COVID arrived, the United States had a sophisticated planning system for confronting pandemics. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5 (HSPD-5), issued after 9/11 and refined after Hurricane Katrina, designated the Secretary of Homeland Security as the principal federal official for domestic incident management and laid out a vast, nationwide response network to manage such situations. FEMA was supposed to be the lead agency underneath the DHS Secretary, with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leading the public health response. Decades of planning, exercises, and statutory authority sat behind this plan.

Then Trump threw it all out. He stood up a hastily assembled White House “task force,” made the HHS secretary chair it, then handed it to the vice president, then handed shadow control to his son-in-law. The DHS secretary at the time — an “acting” secretary who I used to work with, named Chad Wolf — seemed to shy away from leading the effort, while FEMA waited on the sidelines. Subsequent congressional investigations found that the result was chaos and structural collapse, as agencies scrambled to reinvent pandemic response on the fly.

I remember the phone calls at the time. My friend Olivia Troye, who was helping Vice President Mike Pence run the task force from the inside, would call with a tone of contained terror. “It’s so broken, Miles. You have no idea. He’s getting people killed.” She quit eventually and said it publicly, because the alternative was staying silent while the body count climbed. Trump aides partly blamed her for the president’s 2020 loss because her accusations were so damning amidst the crisis.

Nothing has changed, at least not with the interagency structure. It’s still broken. Trump would still likely pull together an ad hoc, free-wheeling, personality-driven “task force” to handle the response. Only next time, Trump will be doing it inside an echo chamber.

At least during COVID, the president was advised by a number of health officials whom he didn’t personally appoint and didn’t know. As such, he was unwittingly surrounded by people with decades of experience who kept their hands on the wheel during some of the more turbulent days. Nevertheless, those public health leaders had to fight through the thick layers of his ignorance to convince him not to tell the whole country to just let it ride.

Next time we won’t be so lucky. Trump’s senior ranks have become an echo chamber, filled by design with sycophants willing to abide his shoot-from-the-hip erraticism. The people in the room don’t push back. They applaud and wax poetic about his genius. In other words, the hesitant grown-ups of the first term are gone. That means in another pandemic, Trump’s “let’s just inject bleach!” musings will be more than just fodder for mockery. They’ll be a death sentence.

SECOND, Trump has purged the federal government of the people who are supposed to save our lives.

It’s not just the upper echelons of power that are filled with inexperienced, unserious loyalists. The president has sought to gut the federal bureaucracy, too. And he’s paired that purge with a steady effort to fill civil service jobs with partisans.

The situation is dire. Last year, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced cuts of 10,000 employees on top of probationary firings that hit pandemic preparedness offices directly. The CDC lost roughly 2,400 staff — about 18 percent of its workforce. The FDA lost 3,500. The NIH lost 1,200. Entire offices that investigate disease outbreaks, manage infectious disease response, and collect surveillance data were then eliminated in a Friday-night massacre during the government shutdown.

Not long before that, Senate-confirmed CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired after refusing, in her lawyer’s words, to “rubber stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” Four senior CDC leaders walked out behind her. Nine former CDC directors from both parties, spanning back to the 1970s, accused Kennedy in a New York Times op-ed of endangering Americans’ health, and more than a thousand current and former HHS employees signed a letter demanding he resign.

Sounds worse than the COVID-era bench, doesn’t it?

Well, it gets worse. The administration isn’t just thinning the ranks. It’s restocking them with less experienced, more political replacements. What ICE is doing openly (i.e. recruiting ideologically motivated foot soldiers through MAGA-coded shitposts and meme campaigns), other agencies are doing more quietly. The next generation of federal workers is being selected for loyalty and from communities that share the president’s skepticism of science, knowledge, and reality.

So when the next pathogen emerges and the president asks for advice, the room probably won’t contain Tony Faucis and Deb Birxs, however imperfect they were. More likely, it will contain podcasters and quacks and vaccine skeptics — and maybe a few terrified careerists who learned what happened to Susan Monarez. Accordingly, the advice the president receives will reflect the company he keeps.

THIRD, Trump will be motivated by “revenge” rather than “response.”

I’m serious when I write that. Look at what the president has done to FEMA in his first year back. As I once warned, the agency has become part of Trump’s revenge machine.

Under Trump, Blue States have been denied disaster assistance, while Red States have been rewarded for their loyalty to the president. An analysis last October discovered that the Trump administration had approved 101 disaster assistance requests from Republican-leaning states and only five for Democratic-leaning states. POLITICO went back and reviewed every disaster declaration since FEMA was created in 1979 and found a stunning partisan disparity in approvals unlike anything in the agency’s history.

Statistically, Blue States have been three times less likely to receive disaster aid than Red States in Trump’s second term. Democratic governors are being told “no” on aid requests that used to be granted automatically. Just last week, a Washington Post investigation found that Trump is withholding fire-prevention money from California and Colorado, even as droughts and dry conditions are creating historic wildfire risks. Tens of millions of dollars are being held back from those states, while their GOP neighbors get federal aid to prepare for fire.

This is completely intentional. In his first term, Trump directed us to withhold fire assistance from Blue States as a means of political punishment. We refused. It was both unethical and illegal. Trump begrudgingly released the funds. Today, the president is apparently surrounded by folks willing to indulge him in letting wildfire country become more dangerous because of his grievances.

What does this have to do with pandemic response?

Well, as of this writing, FEMA — the 911 of the federal government — has been converted into a federal favors agency. Trump didn’t dare do this in his first term, when enough people inside the administration and on Capitol Hill were willing to stop him. Now he has. The data is unambiguous. Hell, he even boasts about it on Truth Social, openly tying disaster aid to which states gave him electoral votes.

“I just approved $60.6 million for the Great State of Tennessee (which I won three times!)” he wrote in February. Trump has been doing that now regularly. Mentioning his vote totals and victories in posts directly tied to the awarding of emergency funds. If you think that’s coincidental, you’re probably a fool.

Now imagine that same instinct applied to a pandemic. Donald Trump is always hunting for leverage. What better leverage to hold over a Democratic governor than the lives of his or her constituents? Vaccines, antivirals, ventilators, federal medical teams, surge capacity — all of it can be released quickly… or held back indefinitely. You want help for your people? Play ball, he might say. Agree to join my mass-deportation plan or hand over your voter rolls.

It’s the current FEMA model, applied to a situation where the cost is much bigger than burned homes. The cost would be mass graves. And that would give Trump a lot of leverage, indeed.

To be clear, health officials are saying the hantavirus that spread on the Hondius cruise ship is not the next pandemic. But something will be. And if it comes during the Trump presidency, the federal government that meets the crisis will be less experienced, less honest, more loyal to one man, and more openly willing to use suffering as a tool of political coercion than at any point in American history. We’ve seen this president mismanage a pandemic, and he learned all the wrong lessons.

So my advice to Blue States would be this: Don’t prepare for the next “big one” by assuming you’ll get help from the federal government. Plan for it like the feds will be a foe. Be prepared to work with your neighbors and count on their humanity rather than depending on Trump’s charity. And, if your attorneys general have the time, prepare to sue the president’s pants off for playing politics with your lives.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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