Six years after the Covid shutdown of March 2020, the nation is still struggling to recover from a trauma that has become deeply politicized. Despite a powerful urge to forget, the pandemic remains a constant influence on the American psyche and American policy.
President Donald Trump in 2025 picked up right where he left off in 2020, hell-bent on bringing to heel the scientific and medical establishments that so often defied him during Covid.
But by the time of his second inauguration, the Covid debate had moved far from the pandemic terror that marked 2020. The arguments now looked back at what went wrong, forward to punishing the guilty, and perhaps to fixing what was broken.
The evolution of the issue fits a pattern. Across time and place, pandemics evoke similar reactions and responses from leaders and the public, sometimes in sequence, sometimes overlapping in time. In Covid, they rolled out in a classic pattern.
First, most begin with a powerful urge to ignore and deny.
President Woodrow Wilson never acknowledged the 1918-1919 Great Influenza. During Covid, Trump spent the Covid-19 golden hour — that precious early time when a new infectious threat might be contained — trying to spin the disease and slam dissenters. In public comments and tweets from January through early March, Trump and his advisers both denied the seriousness of the Covid threat, pointing out that cases and deaths were still few, and accused opponents of concocting a Covid hoax to bring him down. He slammed testing for Covid — more testing meant more cases! — and muzzled CDC officials who accurately predicted a looming infectious calamity.
In fairness, he wasn’t alone in underestimating the Covid risk. Many experts also remained in denial until evidence of Covid’s lethality and transmissibility became incontestable.
Second, as the contagion breaks through, panic. At this stage, governments scramble with incomplete information to manage a surging case load, suffering, and death.
Panic seized the Trump administration and the country in the first week of March 2020. In New York City, the number of Covid diagnoses was doubling every two days. Refrigerator trucks became makeshift morgues as the dead piled up. The stock market crashed, and Trump’s most trusted adviser, Jared Kushner, was jolted by a call from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). New York City’s health system, said the tough, no-nonsense governor, was near collapse under the Covid onslaught. Days later, when Kushner and the health care team recommended a 15-day shutdown, the rattled president was relieved that they didn’t tell him to call in the Army to lock the country down.
Third, weariness and pushback.
As President Joe Biden discovered less than a year into his term, people tolerate heroic measures for only so long. Wars usually generate resistance after a couple of years. So does societal action against plagues. Vaccine and mask mandates blew right up on the administration. As we report in our new book, “Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science,” one of Biden’s advisers recalls the exact moment when the tide shifted. Early on, the Biden team had been besieged with desperate pleas to ship more of the then scarce vaccine. But suddenly, in April 2022, an Ohio health official flashed a red light. Demand for the vaccine had evaporated. They couldn’t use the jabs they already had. A wall of vaccine resistance had materialized, and from then on, especially in red states, the once-prized vaccines became associated with partisan divides, elite overreach, and general skepticism of medicine, public health, and science.
Fourth, anger and the search for scapegoats.
When Trump blazed back into office in 2025, the country perched uneasily at the cusp of this impulse. In his first term, he had stirred up anti-Asian sentiment with catcalls about the “China virus” and “Kung Flu.” By 2022, 1 out of 3 Asian-Americans, and 39% of Chinese Americans, reported knowing someone “who has been threatened or attacked” since the pandemic began.
Nothing new here. Public fear and anger over cholera, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, and influenza repeatedly landed on the powerless. Asians, Irish, Italians, Jews, and immigrants often shouldered the blame for past epidemics. A 1770s yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia was blamed on French immigrants. Calls went out to ban French immigration. Americans blamed cholera outbreaks in the 1800s on newly arrived Irish, calling it “Irish disease.” In the 1880s, when plague broke out in Honolulu and Tacoma, Wash., rioters burned down local Chinatowns.
At the start of Trump’s second term, the administration turned hard on different villains: the scientists who had allegedly misled their country. Here, according to the MAGA universe, festered the deep state. Health officials, starting with Anthony Fauci, had been untrustworthy, self-interested, and aching for power. Their agencies — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the WHO — were unreliable and often malevolent. They were the enemies of Trump’s people.
This focus on science and scientists was unprecedented in pandemic history. It arose in part from the personal animus that Trump had developed toward the once admired leaders of the nation’s premier scientific institutions. As he lunged for miracle cures to fight the virus — sunlight, bleach, hydroxychloroquine, convalescent plasma — experts shot them down one after another. The (to Trump and his team) infuriating review processes of the FDA delayed approval of his truly miraculous vaccine until after the election. Ironically, the FDA-approved jab that once seemed his salvation would later be rejected by his base, in no small part because of his attacks on FDA over the delay.
In 2025, Trump struck back in late-night tweets. The scientific establishment and the deep state wanted to bring him down in November 2020. The MAGA base got the message. These were political operatives dressed up in white coats.
Fifth, amnesia.
There’s always a powerful urge to bury the whole trauma, to lurch toward normalcy, whatever that may be historically. Once upon a time, this made good sense. People did not have the medical tools to fight pandemics, which rampaged through communities. Amnesia helped survivors to put the loss behind them, recover hope in the future, and rebuild their communities.
But contemporary societies have powerful responses. What we need is a careful forensic exercise. What went right and what went wrong during the panicked scramble for solutions? Did masks work? How, precisely, should the states have handled school closures? How could we have gotten more uptake for vaccines? What about mandates — can they work and under what conditions? How should we plan for the next pandemic?
These essential conversations confront the old urge to simply forget. We desperately need a thorough, nonpartisan, evidence-based investigation of the Covid-19 experience — perhaps a commission analogous to the 9/11 body that conducted the after-action review of that tragedy
None of this is happening. With cutbacks on infectious disease research at the NIH, with the hollowing out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with the ending of Covid-era public health funding for states and localities, we may be less prepared for new pandemics than we were for Covid. The opposition to pandemic preparedness presents in part as partisan, but it represents also a deep, psychologically soothing, denial of the experience we all shared in those traumatic early months of Covid before a vaccine became available.
Experts are unanimous in their prediction that more pandemics are coming. While we fight one small distant war after another to protect our homeland from hypothetical rogue state attacks, we are more defenseless than ever against an unseen pathogen that is likely lurking somewhere in nature, ready to start the pandemic cycle all over again.
David Blumenthal is professor of the practice of public health and health policy at Harvard University. James A. Morone is John Hazen White professor emeritus of political science, public policy, and urban studies at Brown University. Together they are the co-authors of “Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science” (Yale University Press).
