Trump said his coronavirus response has been a perfect '10.' Public health experts say it's been 'abysmal' and he needs to 'stop talking.'

Associated Press

President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on coronavirus in the Brady press briefing room at the White House, Saturday, March 14, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

• President Donald Trump on Monday said that on a scale of one to 10 he'd give himself a perfect rating for his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
• But public health experts and a presidential historian fervently disagree with Trump's assessment, and gave the president grades from B-minus to a D-minus when asked by Insider to rate his response to the pandemic the likes of which haven't been seen in a century.
• They credited Trump for forming a task force of some of the country's leading medical experts, but said his comments misled and confused Americans for weeks and that his administration lost valuable time to develop and spread Covid-19 tests.
• "The Trump administration's response has been abysmal. It's hard to imagine how they could've done it worse," Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Insider.
• "[Trump] fundamentally does not understand that his job is to protect the entire nation, not his presidency," Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian, told Insider.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump on Monday said he deserves a perfect score on his response to the coronavirus pandemic so far.

"I'd rate it at 10. I think we've done a great job," Trump said at a White House press conference when asked to grade his handling of the crisis up this point on a scale of one to 10.

After weeks of Trump downplaying the threat of the novel coronavirus as it spread, contradicting his own advisers, and misstating the number of US cases and spread anticipated by scientists, public health experts and a presidential historian gave Trump a dismal review as the US begins grappling with a crisis that could affect citizen's daily life for weeks or months.

"The Trump administration's response has been abysmal. It's hard to imagine how they could've done it worse," Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Insider.

Grading the Trump administration's response to the novel coronavirus on a scale of A to F, Jha said it would be hard to justify giving the president and his team anything above a D.

All of the experts consulted by Insider credited Trump for forming a task force of some of the country's leading medical experts. But they said Trump has been a "bad role model" whose rhetoric has contradicted these officials and who has personally failed to follow recommended precautions. The biggest failure is the shortages of testing kits for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

"We're still the only major country in the world that cannot do widespread testing for coronavirus for people who are sick," Jha said. "That's insane...given our technical and scientific capacity."

This is not a partisan position, Jha said, given he feels a number of Republican governors have done a "fabulous job" handling the pandemic thus far - better than many Democratic governors.

"We're starting to get slowly better. But, my goodness, we've wasted two months. And this is not a disease where you're allowed to waste two months," he added. After reports of a respiratory illness oubreak in China in December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an alert on Jan. 8. Trump imposed a travel ban in late January on air travel from China, but experts said the administration lost valuable time in rapidly attaining COVID-19 tests and preparing hospitals and health care systems for a massive influx of patients.

As Trump declared coronavirus a national emergency last week, he was asked if he feels responsible for the lag in testing. "I don't take responsibility at all," Trump replied. This was just one week after he called the coronavirus test kits "beautiful" and falsely said that "anybody that needs a test gets a test."

As the outbreak spread in the US this week, Trump's rhetoric shifted to take the threat more seriously, calling it an "invisible enemy" and warning the virus oubreak is "a very bad one."

'Two months of completely ignoring every bit of scientific advice'

Beyond the shortfall in testing, which is linked to faulty test kits sent out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in February, Jha said that the administration's messaging on coronavirus has been "terrible."

Jha, who is a general internist who received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, excoriated Trump for painting a rosy picture by repeatedly telling the public that everything was "under control," even as the number of infections and deaths from coronavirus in the US were rising and it "was very clear to anybody paying attention that it was not under control."

On February 26, Trump said there were 15 confirmed coronavirus cases in the US and they would be "close to zero" in a "couple of days." But there were actually at least 60 confirmed cases in the US at the time, and that number was expected to rise. "We do expect more cases, and this is a good time to prepare," Anne Schuchat, a senior CDC official, said while standing just a few feet from Trump in the same press conference.

As of Tuesday morning, more than 4,400 people had tested positive for coronavirus in the US and at least 86 had died.

"[Trump] believed if you don't test and you don't look for the infection, and you argue that it doesn't exist, that somehow it will be so. The virus is one those few things where facts at the end of the day will prevail," Jha said. "You can't ignore your way out of a pandemic."

"Two months of completely ignoring every bit of scientific advice...it's a shocking level of incompetence," Jha added. "I don't use these words lightly, and it's incredibly painful for me to say it...The cost of all of this is that tens of thousands of Americans are going to die unnecessarily...It was wholly preventable - and not just preventable in hindsight, it was preventable in foresight. Everybody said this is how it was going to play out if they didn't act."

'A bad role model'

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law School, told Insider he would give the Trump administration a grade of B-minus and "no more" in terms of its response to COVID-19 up to this point.

"The roll out of testing was badly flawed. The health messaging has been confusing and inconsistent," Gostin said.

Trump has also been a "passive bystander instead of a leader," Gostin added, pointing to the president's lack of guidance or proposals to Congress on emergency funding for the novel coronavirus or the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. Lawmakers of both parties said Trump's request for $2.5 billion to fight the virus was wholly inadequate in late February and more than tripled the funds for vaccines, tests and potential treatments.

"Most importantly, [Trump] has been a bad role model," Gostin said, citing Trump's reluctance to be tested and refusal to publicly adhere to advice from public health officials, such as avoiding shaking hands.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Brian Cornell, the Chairman and CEO of Target Corporation, reaches out and shakes hands with U.S. President Donald Trump after the president declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency during a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, US.

With that said, Gostin said that "the major positive action" from the Trump administration on coronavirus thus far has been convening "a world class public health taskforce."

Echoing these sentiments, Jha said that among the few commendable aspects of Trump's handling of coronavirus was the decision to tap Dr. Debbie Birx as the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus (COVID-19) Task Force.

Birx, who served as a US Army physician before going on to become a leading figure in the fight against HIV, is "as good as they get,"Jha said.

He added that it's been reassuring to see Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top expert on infectious disease who was already a public health hero prior to the coronavirus outbreak, as part of the inner circle. "There is nobody better as a national spokesperson in a moment like this than Tony Fauci," Jha said.

But even with a top-notch team of experts behind him, there are ongoing concerns that Trump's confusing rhetoric and weeks of downplaying the risks has had the effect of many Americans not taking the necessary steps to mitigate the spread of the virus.

"I don't blame Americans who are not taking this very seriously, I blame the political leaders for not having clear messaging," Jha said, citing the example of Trump in late February telling the public coronavirus is "like a flu" when the symptoms are much different and the mortality rate far higher.

"If I was advising President Trump, what I would say is: 'Stop talking. Have Tony Fauci and Debbie Birx do the briefings every day, and let them run the show. And you tell the federal agencies that they have your backing,'" Jha added.

To Jha's point, 60% of Americans say they don't have very much trust, or none at all, in what Trump says about COVID-19, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released on Tuesday.

'His job is to protect the entire nation, not his presidency'

During crises, presidents are expected to display basic competence and instill a sense of confidence in Americans.

On that basis, Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian and director of Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History, told Insider he'd give Trump a D-minus on his coronavirus response.

"The confidence is not necessarily that we will get through this without pain, but that we will all get through this together as a nation. I don't think Trump has accomplished that in the least," Engel said. "He's continued to offer misstatements and fabrications, in direct contradiction to his own experts."

"[Trump] fundamentally does not understand that his job is to protect the entire nation, not his presidency," Engel said, pointing to Trump's obsession with numbers and public perception.

The president, for example, in early March said he'd rather have passengers remain on the Grand Princess cruise ship, which was experiencing a coronavirus outbreak, than come ashore and raise the existing number of cases in the US. "I like the numbers being where they are," Trump said at the time. "I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship."

Through the coronavirus pandemic Americans have witnessed perhaps the most profound example to date of the erosion of US global leadership during the Trump era, Engel went on to say.

During a rare Oval Office address last Wednesday, Trump announced new travel restrictions on Europe. Trump in the speech referred to coronavirus as a "foreign virus," which Engel said was antithetical to everything the US has stood for since World War II.

"Trump's response, and we saw this in his Oval Office address most explicitly, was to blame the outside world and to blame foreigners, and to say the solution for America is to shut ourselves out from the rest," Engel said. "That is exactly the opposite lesson of America since 1945."

Trump says "I don't take responsibility at all" when asked about the delay in coronavirus tests pic.twitter.com/rJYEo7Gfpu

- BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) March 13, 2020

"I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship" -- Trump explains that he doesn't want to let people off the Grand Princess cruise ship because he doesn't want the number of coronavirus cases in the country to go up pic.twitter.com/ELhZDjiZW9

- Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

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