Memo to President Trump, Washington Gov. Inslee: Back off the coronavirus politics

There’s never a good time to politicize a pandemic that’s killed more than 3,000 people around the world so far. But leave it to President Trump to pick the worst possible moment. He resorted to his signature anti-Democrat, anti-news media bashing on the eve of the first reported novel coronavirus fatality in the U.S., a Washington state man.

“This is their new hoax,” Trump said at a rally in South Carolina Friday — an utterly irresponsible statement even by Trumpian standards.

He compared Democrats’ fixation on the virus, known as COVID-19, to the Russia collusion investigation and the impeachment proceedings while gloating that both those efforts failed to take him down.

Wow. Just wow.

Try telling loved ones of the nine King and Snohomish county residents who’d died of coronavirus as of early Tuesday, and dozens more hospitalized with symptoms, that they’re victims of a “hoax.” Try telling it to more than 100 Americans reported infected so far, and thousands of Washingtonians waiting anxiously at ground zero.

Try telling it to Trump’s own experts at the Centers for Disease Control, who’ve warned for weeks that the disease would inevitably spread to the U.S., disrupt lives and not be eradicated quickly.

We wish the president merely suffered from god-awful timing, that he would quickly regroup and rise to the occasion. But he kept up the drumbeat Monday, tweeting another reference to the “Impeachment Hoax” and accusing Democrats of “fear mongering.”

It’s no surprise, sadly, that Trump would view the outbreak of an infectious disease as another chance to score political points.

What’s more surprising is that Washington’s governor would get swept up in the gamesmanship.

Gov. Jay Inslee didn’t have his finest hour last week after Trump’s point man on the coronavirus crisis reached out to him in a gesture of goodwill.

“I just received a call from @VP Mike Pence, thanking Washington state for our efforts to combat the coronavirus,” Inslee tweeted Thursday. “I told him our work would be more successful if the Trump administration stuck to the science and told the truth.”

To be fair to Inslee, he does have a point. Over the last three years, the White House has accumulated a shameful record of ignoring, even muzzling, federal scientists on everything from climate change to hurricanes. Trump continues to undermine journalists, discredit science and trash-talk government agencies; the consequence is that many Americans are suspicious of advice, warnings or reassurance coming from objective public health experts.

Certainly it would be appropriate for Inslee to have a frank private exchange with Pence, himself a former governor, about Washington state’s concerns about the federal coronavirus response. We hope such a conversation took place.

But if the president has taught us anything, it’s that Twitter is a blunt instrument in the hands of politicians, ineffective for much beyond eye poking and chest thumping.

We get that this is open season for politics, with Trump appearing on the March 10 Washington presidential primary ballot alongside several Democrats — a race that included Inslee until he dropped out last August. We’re also aware that Inslee has used social media to take shots at the Trump administration in the past.

But there’s something unseemly about such exhibitionism when a pandemic is slipping through your state’s front door. It also can’t be helpful for building alliances Washington will need as federal resources are distributed to address nationwide COVID-19 impacts.

Right now officials at every level of government must maintain a laser-like focus on the public interest as this alarming outbreak enters its next phase.

For Trump to pull that off would require defying all expectations. For Inslee, however, it may simply mean heeding his own advice, which he gave the president during a 2018 meeting with governors at the White House:

“We need a little less tweeting,” Inslee told Trump, “and a little more listening.”

This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 5:30 AM.