By the third week of March this year, President Donald Trump called himself a “wartime president.”
Some of this nation’s greatest presidents were wartime presidents. They endured the losses of hundreds of thousands of citizens during their administrations. It is telling to see how Trump stacks up against them.
On March 18, almost exactly one month after the first death of an American from COVID-19, he described the situation: “To this day, nobody has ever seen like it, what they were able to do during World War II. Now it’s our time. We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together, and we will come through together. It’s the invisible enemy. That’s always the toughest enemy, the invisible enemy.”
President Franklin Roosevelt, only days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, voiced a similar need to sacrifice for the common good, and the need to finance the war singled out the necessity of raising taxes. The country supported him.
The American Civil War was one of the deadliest wars in the country’s history. In it, over 365,000 U.S. military personnel died, for an average of approximately 244 deaths per day. Over 290,000 Confederate soldiers died, bringing the combined total of military deaths on both sides to over 655,000, or approximately 439 deaths per day.
Military deaths for U. S. forces in World War I stand at 116,708, which comes to approximately 203 deaths per day, considerably fewer than during the American Civil War. Unsurprisingly, the second world war was deadlier than the first. With a total of approximately 407,300 U.S. military deaths, the average in World War II came to 304 deaths per day.
By comparison, the war — if we agree on calling a pandemic a war — against COVID-19 is the deadliest in American history. Between Feb. 23, the day on which the first American death from the disease occurred, and as of July 22, more than 144,000 persons have died from it in the United States. This comes to 961 deaths per day — more than three times the average number of American deaths per day for all of World War II.
Over the past month, the “invisible enemy” has managed to dig ever deeper into the fabric of American life, with both sickness and death rates rising since June. As a wartime president, Trump’s record is on top — in terms of the largest number of American deaths per day.
When faced with dangerous foes in both Europe and the western Pacific, Franklin Roosevelt was a consummate leader. He focused on what needed to be done to build up the necessary equipment and supplies necessary to prosecute the war and listened to a broad range of specialists. He brought in the military’s best and brightest leaders, as well as scientists, economists, and many more. Importantly, Roosevelt listened carefully to their recommendations, made choices, and implemented them.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, lacks the attention span necessary to prosecute a war. Although he spoke of the need for mutual sacrifice, he did not call on the wealthy and privileged to forgo their earlier tax cuts and contribute more to the government’s enormous expenditures for the mitigation of the disease and its economic impact. The Trump administration focused on the sacrifices of essential workers, with “essential” often being defined as workers in the meat processing plants and other facilities that created income for the president’s political supporters, as well as medical personnel, transportation employees and all the people who made sure that the food and supplies of daily life remained available while the rest of us were locked down. While the rich shelter on their private islands, those who work for a living have been forced to take their chances and die in far larger proportions.
Perhaps most tellingly, Trump has sidelined his most knowledgeable advisors. When he has disagreed with the infectious disease experts and epidemiologists who know best how to counter this invisible enemy, Trump quit listening to them. Instead, he has asked advice primarily from those whose main qualification is personal loyalty; they are not pressing him for an integrated federal response to COVID-19.
Imagine Roosevelt turning away from the advice of the military’s leading generals and admirals in the spring of 1942 and listening instead to the leading white supremacists of the day, such as the popular radio personality Father Charles Coughlin, who overtly expressed his Nazi sympathies, and the flyer Charles Lindbergh, who urged Congress to negotiate a neutrality pact with Hitler’s Germany.
Imagine what might have happened if Roosevelt had gotten tired of all the effort it was taking to oppose Japan’s fascistic imperialism in Asia and Nazi and Fascist expansionism in Europe and simply signed a neutrality pact with Hitler, Hideki Tojo and Mussolini only a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. That is, essentially, how today’s president of the United States has reacted to the deadly attack of COVID-19 on our country.
Roosevelt will always be remembered by his words, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” And Trump will always be remembered by his: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
William Johnston is the John E. Andrus Professor of History at Wesleyan University in Middletown.
