What Trump Can Learn from Boris Johnson’s Mistakes

On the cover of yesterday’s New York Post, the president’s favorite paper, is a picture of Trump, looking regal, and peeling off his face mask. “FACE OFF,” the headline reads. “Prez claims: ‘Don’t be afraid of COVID.’” Such a gesture is open to interpretation. Either, you might say, as some have, that Trump is emulating the kind of Gospel wisdom espoused by the likes of Pope John Paul II (“Be not afraid”), that what Trump means to say is that God is in His Heaven, thus, as Julian of Norwich put it, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Alternatively, you might say that Trump is exhibiting the sort of reckless personal pride that typically precedes a gigantic tumble.

In either case, the headline does recall the fate of a certain prime minister of the United Kingdom, who at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis was quite adamant that human fearlessness was the way to go. This singularly cheerful chap boasted about his “shaking hands with everybody” at a hospital he visited — as if COVID-19 worked something like AIDS — including hands belonging to coronavirus patients. We all know how that turned out. Boris Johnson contracted the virus, was admitted to the hospital, and thereafter was moved to an intensive-care unit, where he now says that it “could have gone either way.” Having fallen gravely ill, Johnson grappled (with varying degrees of success) with the following issues which we might also consider in relation to Trump.
Transparency with the public.

As National Review’s editorial on the subject reads, “at this sensitive moment, it is of the utmost important that the White House convey accurate information about the president’s condition.” We opined that the initial talk of “mild symptoms” and Trump’s going to hospital out of an “abundance of caution” was “misleading,” as was the White House physician’s “dancing around to avoid disclosing that the president had received supplemental oxygen.”

There was a very similar “dancing around” in Britain with regard to Johnson’s diagnosis. When he was first admitted to the hospital, in April, Johnson tweeted that he was going in for “some routine tests,” since he was, after ten days, “still experiencing coronavirus symptoms,” though he assured the public that he was in “good spirits.” The BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, complained that “after very, very little information was shared today, the prime minister was taken into intensive care at around 19:00 BST.” The result of this strategy was more fear and distrust, not less.