The weird thing about Donald Trump’s handling of Covid-19, alongside all the other weird things, is that he has always been a near-pathological germaphobe. He likes fast food, we’ve been told, in part because it is barely touched by human hands; he prefers not to press the lowest button on an elevator; he asks Oval Office visitors to wash their hands in a nearby bathroom; he routinely has a bottle of Purell sanitiser available whenever he has to touch hoi polloi; he lost some real estate deals in the past because he wouldn’t shake hands. Last year, Politico called him ‘the most germ-conscious man to ever lead the free world’. The same magazine quoted a Trump campaign official saying: ‘If you’re the perpetrator of a cough or of a sneeze or any kind of thing that makes you look sick, you get that look. You get the scowl. You get the response of — he’ll put a hand up in a gesture of, you should be backing away.’ He once told the radio star Howard Stern that he washes his hands every day ‘as many times as possible’. One of his old cronies, Anthony Scaramucci, saw it up close: ‘If you’re standing by him, and you’re going to look at something on his desk, and you lick your index finger to open the thing to try to catch an edge on the paper, he’ll smack your hand and be like “What are you, disgusting?”’
So why, why, why did Trump not go nuclear on Covid-19? Why on earth did he deny it, lie about it, undermine basic public health guidelines on it, refuse to wear a mask, mock those who did, market quack cures, and allow his own White House to host a superspreader event that led to more Covid cases than the rest of Washington combined? For that matter, why didn’t this instinctually authoritarian man react to Covid by shutting down all US borders, and subject US citizens returning home — including from Europe — to the kind of hygienic ordeal he routinely demands of anyone who comes close to him? I don’t really have an answer.
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