The worst ‘weave’ from Trump is lies about a pandemic that killed so many Americans | Opinion

Former President Trump fancies himself a gifted orator, casting his rambling non-sequiturs as an artful “weave.” The warp and weft of his campaign’s fabric are a disjointed tangle of lies and insults, cheap cheesecloth marketed as silk brocade. The deceptions are not just materials for jokes, however, because these disinformation vignettes can cause real harm, as in the outright untruths about FEMA aid in North Carolina, and the “eating the pets” fictions that are still being repeated.

While our attention is riveted by the recent garbage truck stunt, yet another diversion from the revelations and warnings dished up by General John Kelly about his former boss, there’s a quieter thread we should be focusing on: the weave of lies crafted from COVID. The publication of Bob Woodward’s War disclosed that then-president Donald Trump, who knew well the dangers of the novel coronavirus, “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use” while the terrifying virus was shape-shifting, Americans were dying, and supplies were desperately needed on the home front. As researchers and writers of COVID death and mourning, we know how painful that betrayal is to the millions of people who lost loved ones during the pandemic and to the healthcare workers who tried valiantly to save them.

Trump’s grift, which represents utter disregard for the psychological and physical safety of American citizens, is ongoing. Trump and his acolytes have built a conspiracy-fueled set of dangerous pandemic counter-truths since the former president left the White House in 2021. Even while denying its facts, his circle has never stopped commodifying COVID. Watch a Trump rally on the RSBN network, and you’ll see a split screen display featuring images that resemble retro Sea Monkey ads: Contagion Emergency Kits for sale alongside Trump Combat Knives, Never Surrender Collectors Edition Pinot Noir, pitches to protect IRA’s by giving money to Birch Gold, and much more.

The Contagion Kits were even the obvious star during the RSBN coverage of the Madison Square Garden rally just a few days ago. Available for over $300 per person, they are a bucket of medical disinformation, containing Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, generic antibiotics, Tamiflu, and a nebulizer with a recipe for a DIY “protocol” that was warned about by many authorities when it was first pushed online in 2020. The reason you need the Contagion Kits? To “get the life-saving medications that were withheld” previously during COVID. The language on the Wellness Company website hawking the merch, all derived from the Make America Healthy Again lexicon, is deployed to instill fear and monetize their followers’ distrust in standardized medicine.

The irony of this marketing, similar to the Trump bibles that former President Obama flagged as snake oil at the Harris-Walz Atlanta rally, is that it attempts to ensure safety to the customer though it is nothing but a continuance of tragically failed pandemic policies. At the same rally, Obama asked the crowd to note that over 600,000 “grandparents …aunts …parents…friends” might have been saved if the pandemic playbook his administration had handed over to Trump’s had not been trashed. “So you do the math!” Obama said.

And so, in the torrent of Trump and MAGA world lies dominating much of our current election coverage, the question then becomes, what’s left to counter the hypocritical “weave” of disinformation about service, science, public health, and our nation’s well-being? We believe that an effective response is the truth serum of unvarnished experience—from General Kelly’s five-bell-alarm accounts of Trump’s ignorance of history and military service to honoring the memories of the 1.2+ million who died of COVID.

Vice President Harris began down this road in her anaphoric monologue on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show. She implored America to “ … Remember that people by the hundreds were dying every day? … People who were in hospitals? Without their family? Where the only touch that they had was of a nurse that they hadn’t met because the family could not get there? …” And a few days later, speaking with Charlamagne tha God, she asked listeners to remember how “people were scrambling for resources and needed tests” and the “number of people who lost their grandparents and parents.”

Harris’ call to remember was a welcome start. These stories have to be told, both before and after the election, as their experiential truths are an antidote to the denial of scientific evidence. While pundits might advise politicians to avoid reminding the electorate of COVID, our work as pandemic researchers illuminates another path. We know it’s not just Obama’s “math,” it’s also about memory. There are millions and millions of voters who either lost loved ones, put themselves in danger by working on the front lines of the disease, or both. Their stories must be respected and remembered before they are co-opted again and woven into another ugly fabric on the MAGA disinformation loom. Recently, we interviewed a nurse to whom the Putin COVID test news is an affront to the trauma she endured, and a denigration of all the patients whose hands she stroked as they passed. The Harris-Walz campaign needs to consistently show her that in their administration, an experience like hers will be treasured. There are many Americans with similar stories. Their votes might make all the difference.

Martha Greenwald is a Louisville writer and the editor of “What We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial.” Sarah Wagner is an anthropology professor at George Washington University working on pandemic remembrance.