Calling On The Deep State (Editorial)

“The risk to the American people remains very low. We have the greatest experts, really in the world, right here.” — President Donald Trump

Here are three things we know:

1. Trust is easily squandered and excruciatingly hard to regain.

2. A problem with being fast and loose with the truth is that when you need people to trust you, a lot of them won’t.

3. When the United States is facing a potential pandemic — and the potential of an accompanying economic downturn — its citizens need to be able to trust their government.

Unfortunately, the Donald Trump who assured Americans last week that their risk from the coronavirus was “very low” is the same Donald Trump who used a Sharpie to alter the projected path of a hurricane. The ensuing controversy led Neil Jacobs, acting administrator of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, to write a NOAA scientist, “You have no idea how hard I’m fighting to keep politics out of science. We are an objective science agency, and we won’t and never will base any decisions on anything other than science.”

Journalist Salena Zito wrote of Trump’s 2016 campaign: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” It was an intriguing insight, but now, when it comes to government pronouncements on the virus, press and supporters and everyone else need to be able to take Trump literally, because lives — not to mention corporate earnings and 401(k) balances — are on the line.

The irony is that it will likely fall on the “deep state,” those scientists and bureaucrats at agencies like the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, to protect us. We can only hope that they, like the scientists and bureaucrats at NOAA, fight hard to keep politics out of science.