To attack DeSantis, Trump is rehabilitating the Left’s arguments against conservative governance during the pandemic.
Donald Trump’s slapdash crusade to sling whatever mud is at hand in Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s direction is succeeding. At least, it’s succeeding if the goal is to generate positive coverage for the former president in some unlikely left-of-center venues. Given Trump’s latest assault, it’s not hard to see why. The former president has outed himself as a “Cuomosexual” — or, at the very least, Cuomo-curious.
In a post on Trump’s social-media website, Trump pressed his multi-pronged assault on DeSantis’s credibility by resurrecting an attack on the governor’s record that was once common on the left but has since fallen out of fashion. In his post, Trump shared a graph produced by Johns Hopkins University and published by CNN showing the raw “total number of Covid-19 cases” by state. Unsurprisingly, with California and Texas leading the way, the graph shows that the states with the largest populations also had the most Covid cases. But the image also indicates that Florida was host to nearly 750,000 more Covid infections than was New York despite the Sunshine State’s larger population. This observation prompted Trump to heap scorn on DeSantis’s pandemic-era leadership.
“So, explain. Why did Ron DeSanctus [sic] do a good job?” Trump sputtered. “Highly overrated. New York had fewer Covid Cases!”
To explain, per the former president’s solicitation, Covid case rates are not a metric that should be evaluated as part of an effort to discern the success or failure of a given public policy — particularly following the advent and widespread uptake of vaccines that reduced the likelihood of severe outcomes resulting from infection. That is a realization the American Right popularized, and it’s a conclusion the Left resisted before reluctantly arriving at the same conclusion.
“The major goalposts should have always been the hospitalizations and deaths,” Boston Children’s Hospital epidemiologist John Brownstein told ABC News in the fall of 2021. Trump, of all people, should know that. He devoted many of his mid pandemic presidential press conferences to highlighting Covid’s “case fatality” rates, which some media outlets attacked as a veiled attempt to mute coverage of diagnosed coronavirus cases. At the time, it was Trump who sought to contextualize case rates and Trump’s critics who rejected that reasonable approach. Today, Trump has adopted the language of his tormentors.
Beyond Trump’s selective amnesia, his promotion of Andrew Cuomo’s New York as a public-health model relative to Florida betrays either his ignorance on the most consequential crisis of his presidency or his disregard for its lessons. While Cuomo was obsessing over what food constituted a “meal” sufficient to justify the provision of beverages by a restaurant or bar, the former governor’s signature public-health policy — interning vulnerable seniors in nursing homes alongside Covid-positive patients, with calamitous results — was killing the elderly.
DeSantis rejected the Cuomo model of Covid management, and he took no small amount of grief over it in the press. While Cuomo was being fêted in mainstream-media venues, his state’s attorney general later determined that the governor’s administration systematically undercounted nursing-home deaths — a charge that Cuomo later acknowledged was accurate but defended as an effort to prevent Donald Trump from weaponizing New York’s conduct.
The divergent approaches toward the public-health emergency adopted by New York and Florida have led many to directly compare the two states’ outcomes. The partisan imperative to declare one state’s model the pandemic “winner” pervades many of those analyses. The data can be parsed finely enough to make a case for either state, but the statistics pertaining to their respective rates of Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths track closely enough with one another that a purely epidemiological analysis frustrates partisan actors. What does differentiate these states are their distinct mitigation strategies.
New York embraced masking and vaccination mandates. It required proof of vaccination and masking to enter public facilities and private businesses. It shuttered noncompliant firms, micromanaged private affairs, and severely truncated the vital economic activities in which enterprises could engage. A brief dalliance with lockdowns at the start of the pandemic notwithstanding, Florida avoided these onerous intrusions into private affairs. It wasn’t Florida’s successful suppression of Covid infections that led New Yorkers to flee to Florida in droves in this decade but Tallahassee’s emphasis on personal liberty.
Donald Trump should remember all this. He was at the center of this defining American debate. But his foremost political objective today is to undermine his most viable opponent for the Republican nomination, and a long memory is an obstacle before that objective.
To attack DeSantis, Trump is rehabilitating the arguments against conservative governance during the pandemic and even validating some of his more intemperate critics. The strategy may succeed in popularizing the case against DeSantis’s Covid management and again win him the Republican presidential nomination — but at what cost?