President Donald Trump's administration communicated to the public in various ways during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, as seen on social media, in interviews, and press conferences with the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Opinion polling conducted in mid-April 2020 indicated that less than half of Americans trusted health information provided by Trump and that they were more inclined to trust local government officials, state government officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci. This low level of trust was partly attributed to frequent changes in health safety guidance and the circulation of misinformation spread by unconfirmed bias media sources and conspiracy theorists during the pandemic.
Trump remained publicly optimistic through much of the pandemic; at times his optimistic messaging diverged from that of his administration's public health officials. From January to mid-March 2020, Trump downplayed the threat posed by COVID-19 to the United States, as well as the severity of the outbreak. Trump did, however, place restrictions on travel from China on January 31. From February to May, Trump continually asserted that COVID-19 would "go away". The CDC waited until February 25 to first warn the American public to prepare for a local outbreak of the virus. In March 2020, the administration began conducting daily press briefings at the White House, where Trump was the dominant speaker.
Trump repeatedly made false statements regarding the pandemic. He took messaging advice from Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, both of whom he dialed into Oval Office meetings. Trump exaggerated the impact of measures taken by his government and the private sector, understated the projected time to produce a vaccine, recommended uncontrolled transmission in pursuit of herd immunity until a vaccine was developed, and promoted unapproved treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. In such instances, scientists, including Anthony Fauci, Michael Osterholm, and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (director-general of the World Health Organization), publicly countered his misleading messages with correct information. Trump also frequently reversed his stances in his communication, leading to mixed or contradictory messaging. He sometimes denied his own public statements.
Trump repeatedly blamed others for the severity of the outbreak. The most frequent targets of his criticism were Democrats, followed by the media, state governors, and China (where the virus originated). Trump went from praising China in January regarding their transparency in response to the Chinese outbreak, to criticizing China in March for a lack of transparency, to criticizing the World Health Organization in April for praising China's transparency.
Severity and risk assessments in 2020 January 1 to February 24
In January and February 2020, U.S. intelligence agencies delivered over a dozen classified warnings in the President's Daily Brief about COVID-19, including its potential to inflict severe political and economic damage. President Donald Trump typically did not read daily briefs and often has "little patience" for oral summaries, The Washington Post reported. Each brief was also shared with other officials in the administration. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which produces the President's Daily Brief, denied that there were repeated mentions of COVID-19.
On January 8, 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a health advisory regarding an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, which was being caused by a yet-unidentified virus. It issued a low-level travel notice for Wuhan with a reminder to practice "usual precautions". The CDC advised clinicians that U.S. patients with severe respiratory illnesses should be checked for travel history to Wuhan, and that health authorities should be immediately informed of cases meeting such criteria.
On January 17, the CDC conducted its first press briefing on the novel coronavirus. On January 21, after the first U.S case of the novel coronavirus was confirmed, the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases director, Nancy Messonnier, stated that additional cases were expected to occur globally from human-to-human transmission, but the disease posed a low risk to the public at large.
On January 22, Trump was interviewed by the media and acknowledged that the CDC had briefed him on the sole known COVID-19 case in the country. Trump stated "we have it under control". He continued to claim that the outbreak was "under control" on January 30, February 23, February 24, and February 25.
On January 27, Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted that "things are going to get worse before they get better". Three days later, Fauci stated that the COVID-19 outbreak "could turn into a global pandemic". Also on January 30, CDC Director Robert Redfield said that "the immediate risk to the American public is low."
On February 10, Trump stated that "a lot of people think that [COVID-19] goes away in April with the heat ... Typically, that will go away in April" (later, on April 3, he denied ever having given "a date" for the departure of the virus). On February 13, CDC director Robert Redfield contradicted Trump, saying that the "virus is probably with us beyond this season, beyond this year". Redfield also predicted that it "will become a community virus at some point in time, this year or next year". On February 16, Anthony Fauci warned that it was not necessarily true that COVID-19 would "disappear with the warm weather."
On February 24, senior members of the Trump administration economic team spoke to the board of the Hoover Institution in private, warning them that it was not yet possible to estimate the virus' effects on the economy. Later that day, however, Trump tweeted that the virus was "very much under control" in the United States.
February 25 to March 15 February 25 was the day that the CDC first warned the American public to prepare for a local outbreak. That day, Nancy Messonnier, head of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that "We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare for the expectation that this is going to be bad." Messonnier predicted that "we will see community spread in this country", and it was only a matter of time. As a result, "disruption to everyday life might be severe". Messonnier stated that the CDC is preparing, and "now is the time for hospitals, schools and everyday people to begin preparing as well." Starting the day after her comments, Messonnier was excluded from public briefings of the White House coronavirus task force, and Trump threatened to fire her.
Also on February 25, Anthony Fauci declared that given how COVID-19 was spreading in other nations, it was "inevitable that this will come to the United States" as well. On February 26, CDC Director Robert Redfield said it would be "prudent to assume this pathogen will be with us for some time to come".
Meanwhile, on February 25, federal economic policy chief Larry Kudlow declared the COVID-19 containment "pretty close to airtight". On February 26, Trump contradicted Messonnier, stating: "I don't think it's inevitable" that a U.S. outbreak would occur, "It probably will, it possibly will ... Whatever happens, we're totally prepared." Trump additionally declared that the number of infected was "going very substantially down, not up", but stated: "Schools should be preparing. Get ready just in case."
On February 26, speaking of the number of known infected in the country at the time, Trump predicted "the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero—that's a pretty good job we've done." He rejected the notion that the U.S. needed to produce more masks, stating: "Our borders are very controlled." He contrasted COVID-19's mortality rate with that of Ebola, stating: "This is a flu. This is like a flu."
On February 27, he said of the virus: "It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear. And from our shores, you know, it could get worse before it gets better. Could maybe go away. We'll see what happens. Nobody really knows." Also on February 27, Trump declared that the risk to the American public from COVID-19 "remains very low".
On February 28, Trump's campaign manager Brad Parscale told Jared Kushner that it would serve Trump's reelection chances to have "more visuals." Parscale wanted Trump "standing in front of amazing things. Put the white coat on. Look at the vaccine being made. Show America we're doing stuff." (This was reported in Bob Woodward's book Rage released in September 2020.) Later that day, at a campaign rally, Trump pointed out that, as yet, there had been zero known deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. (compared to about 35,000 influenza deaths in the U.S. each year), and he concluded: "You wonder if the press is in hysteria mode."
On February 29, Trump said that "additional cases in the United States are likely", but "there's no reason to panic at all." When a reporter asked Trump: "How should Americans prepare for this virus?" Trump answered: "I hope they don't change their routine", before calling on CDC director Robert Redfield to answer the same question. Redfield replied: "The risk at this time is low ... The American public needs to go on with their normal lives."
On March 2, Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, voiced his concern that in the next one to three weeks, the U.S. would "see a lot more community-related cases", due to the country already having identified "a number of cases" that have "been in the community for a while".
On March 4, Trump appeared on Fox News's Hannity by phone, where he claimed a 3.4% mortality rate projected by the World Health Organization (WHO) was a "false number", and stated his "hunch" that the true figure would be "way under 1%". Trump also predicted that many people infected with COVID-19 would experience "very mild" symptoms, "get better very rapidly" and thus they "don't even call a doctor". Thus, there may be "hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work—some of them go to work, but they get better." Trump used this to argue that there would be an under-reporting of cases and an over-estimation of the death rate.
On March 6, CDC director Robert Redfield again said that the risk to the American public was "low", asserting that there were not "hundreds and hundreds of clusters" of COVID-19 cases in the country, and declaring that "we're not blind where this virus is right now in the United States". On March 7, Redfield encouraged Americans to continue their travel, even take a trip to Disneyland (within one week, Disneyland parks were closed in the country). On March 9, Redfield repeated that the risk to the American public was still "low".
From March 6 to March 12, Trump stated on four occasions that the coronavirus would "go away". On March 10, Surgeon General Jerome Adams stated that "this is likely going to get worse before it gets better."
Trump expressed a focus on the number of U.S. cases in the initial stages of the outbreak, citing the relatively low number of confirmed cases as proof that his January 31 decision to restrict entry into the country from China by foreign nationals was successful. Commenting about cruise ship Grand Princess, he stated his preference that infected passengers not disembark as he did not want "to have the [U.S. case] numbers double because of one ship". Trump explained in his March 25 briefing that "if I didn't do it, you'd have thousands and thousands of people died—who would've died—that are now living and happy".