It’s no accident that the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the United States worse than any other nation on earth. Even today, tens of millions of Americans refuse to get vaccinated or take minimal public health precautions. Republican leaders continue to ridicule the virus and make fun of health officials. Nurses and physicians sometimes receive
death threats from their own coronavirus patients.
What is our problem? It all goes back to Donald Trump’s most influential speech, which he gave at a
February 28, 2020 campaign rally in Charleston, South Carolina. When I say “influential,” I don’t mean that Trump gave a good speech. I don’t mean the public speaking textbooks will talk about this speech. I mean that this awful speech had massive public impact. This speech’s six deadly words have spread through the conservative movement’s collective soul.
The virus is a contagion of microbes. The idea that the virus is a hoax has spread like a contagion through right-wing media and social groups.
Trump’s Six Deadly Words Trump’s Charleston speech rambled incoherently for almost an hour and 20 minutes. It was, however, just one six-word sentence that ignited the deadly fires of coronavirus ignorance. Just six words launched the conspiracy theories and rampant stupidity that prevents the United States from controlling the coronavirus 18 months later. For, Trump said:
“And this is their new hoax.”
Cable news talk show hosts, right-wing radio pundits, and Russian trolls have spread and amplified Trump’s simple message that the coronavirus is a hoax ever since. Although Trump’s speech is long forgotten, his message resonates through America’s public health life.
With those six words, Trump convinced his millions of followers not to worry about the coronavirus. On the contrary: Trump convinced them to reject any thought that the coronavirus endangers them. And, my goodness, was Trump clever when he talked about the “hoax.” In context, he didn’t literally say that the virus wasn’t real; he accused his opponents of manipulating and exaggerating information about the virus. He meant that all the talk about the coronavirus was political and malicious. This was, as we will see, a dog whistle that his supporters could understand perfectly well. To his supporters, the important point was not whether the virus was literally real. Instead, the point was whether they could trust anyone who talked about it. That’s a lot of complexity from one 6-word sentence, isn’t it?
A String of Hoaxes? How did a mere six words from Trump, the master salesperson, cause so much damage? Well, one thing that Trump excels at is twisting words. Let’s back up a bit and look earlier in the speech, when he complained about the “impeachment hoax:”
“They tried the impeachment hoax.… They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”
So, Trump complained about impeachment, which he called a hoax. He then grumbled about other unnamed hoaxes: “It’s all turning.” I don’t know what Trump meant, exactly, but it sounds as if hoaxes are turning around everywhere. Within that context, Trump could imply that the coronavirus was just one more hoax from a long list. These supposed hoaxes, starting with the “impeachment hoax,” had one goal: to remove Trump from office.
Let us not overlook Trump’s next point, when he said that the coronavirus was not affecting the United States. He claimed that there were only 15 cases at the time and boasted of “early” steps to control the disease:
“We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early. We went early, we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great.”
What did Trump do that was early? He didn’t say. He was long past talking about facts. The only thing that mattered was that he had said: “And this is their new hoax.”
Conspiracies Rule the Earth? A hoax, new or old, would be spread by conspiracies. Trump’s tactic worked because his audience was already adapted to – and ready to receive – bizarre conspiracy theories. People who thought that Obama forged his birth certificate and instituted death panels were ready to believe that the coronavirus was just one more hoax. Once the audience believed – as his rally crowd obviously did – that the Democrats were using endless dirty tricks to remove Trump from office, it was a simple step to think that the coronavirus was merely one more tiresome hoax.
Reality soon attacked the hoax hypothesis, didn’t it? The 15 coronavirus cases that Trump cited in February 2020 have, by late summer 2021,
multiplied into tens of millions of cases and more than 600,000 documented pandemic deaths.
Given that massive spread, can people still believe that the coronavirus is a hoax? Probably not. But people can still believe in a toned-down hoax hypothesis – maybe the coronavirus is just the flu, or the coronavirus only kills old people, or the coronavirus only affects cities, or it’s all coming from immigrants. Whatever. Once people decide that a hoax is involved, they no longer care about the details. And, of course, no conspiracy theorist needs to believe consistent things. Conspiracy theorists are eager to flip and flop their opinions from one ridiculous claim to another. The only thing they need to feel consistent about is that mysterious, powerful, wicked forces are out to get them.
Tricky Wording, Tricky Hoax? Also note how cleverly Trump phrased his point to evade fact-checkers. His statement implied that the coronavirus itself was a hoax. But what he actually said – read literally and in context – was that his political opponents were drumming the coronavirus out of proportion. The only reason for his opponents to talk about “their new hoax,” Trump implied, was to make him look bad.
So, now, more than a year later, millions of Americans still think that the coronavirus is just the flu, or that the public or authorities want them to wear masks and take vaccines for the purpose of controlling them, or that the only reason to engage in social distancing or business restrictions is to harm Trump’s supporters.
One of the most remarkable features of Trump’s “And this is our new hoax” is that it passed fact checkers! Some Democrats accused Trump of calling the virus a hoax. The Democrats, not Trump, failed with the fact checkers! But Trump was actually saying that reporting about the coronavirus was a hoax. I’m not sure that matters in real life – if it is a hoax for reporters to say that the coronavirus is bad, I don’t see a practical difference. All the same, Democratic leaders plopped right into Trump’s trap. For example, when Kamala Harris accused Trump of calling the virus a hoax, PolitiFact.com
rated her statement False. And, yes, you guessed it, PolitiFact concluded that Trump was only calling the publicity about the coronavirus a hoax, not the virus itself. The oldest fact-checking website, FactCheck.org,
waffled a little bit, concluding “But that’s not what Trump said he meant.” Hmm.
Dog-Whistle Rhetoric However, despite all the waffling, Trump’s supporters knew perfectly well what he meant. Conservatives have long used dog-whistle communication. That is, they say things that literally mean one thing, but they know the hidden meaning. For example, when right-wing demonstrators refuse to say “Black lives matter,” insisting instead that “All lives matter,” we know perfectly well that they are fudging over whether Black lives matter at all. At the same time, because of how “All lives matter” is phrased, they can absolutely deny any such evil motive. In the 1960s, the John Birch Society said to “Support Your Local Police,” when what they meant was “Oppose civil rights.” The idea of dog-whistle communication is to say things that your listeners will understand, but whose hidden meaning you can deny with your last breath.
So, when Trump said, “And this is our new hoax,” he could squirm around to say that he wasn’t really calling the virus a hoax. Conservative audiences understood perfectly well, however, what he wanted them to think. To this day, Trump’s supporters still underestimate the coronavirus and refuse to take the most basic public health precautions. For example, a
Nevada woman who lost her husband to the disease said that she had believed that the virus was a “political game.” In Trump-supporting
Clarion County, Pennsylvania, people this week are saying things like: “I don’t think COVID’s that serious, anyways. I don’t see it as anything more than a cold.” As if the coronavirus is a semi-hoax.
Fred Lowry, a local Florida Republican politician, said on May 30, 2021 that “We did not have a pandemic, folks. We were lied to.” At this writing, three months later, he lies in a hospital bed, desperately ill with a coronavirus infection.
Yet, Trump’s “And this is our new hoax” eventually caught Trump himself. A few weeks ago, Trump told rally attendees that he had been vaccinated against coronavirus. He told them that the vaccine was good. He said that they should take it themselves. The result? The crowd booed!
After all, why should you get vaccinated against a hoax?
Conclusion Trump sneaked six simple words into an otherwise unremarkable speech: “And this is their new hoax.” Once that idea became implanted in conservative ideology, it spread and morphed into a complex web of coronavirus denial.
Just think, if Trump had simply said, “The virus is bad, and let’s beat it,” how much better off we would all be today—Trump, himself, included.
_________________
Research note: Communication scholars use the term “multivocal communication” when they talk about dog-whistle politics. What that means is that certain statements carry more than one meaning. In addition to a literal meaning, multivocal statements carry a hidden meaning that true believers understand perfectly well. Interested readers might look at an article by Bethany Albertson. She explains that: “Multivocal communication occurs when the same words have distinct meanings to different audiences.” You can read her paper, published in the academic journal Political Behavior
.The idea that information about risks can spread through formal and informal social networks is called Contagion Theory. In this case, it’s not just that American conservatives rely on partisan news sources. Also, people tend to share their ideas about risks through their social networks. Social groups, both in-person (like families) and on-line networks develop to exchange information about what people perceive to be the risks of the coronavirus. In this case, Trump started the contagion, but his idea has spread throughout a massive social ecosystem. Clifford W. Scherer and Hichang Cho explain the basics of Contagion Theory in this excellent peer-reviewed article. _________________
Here is the entire “new hoax” passage from Trump’s speech:
“One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early. We went early, we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified.”
_________________
Once again, I am grateful for the good people at Rev.com, who published a verbatim transcript of Trump’s speech. They operate a transcription service, but they also publish important speeches as a public benefit.
Image credits: CDC image; Trump’s official White House photo
