How not to communicate during a real crisis like the coronavirus

Randall Munroe’s xkcd web comic for March 9, 2020 about a scientific briefing (shown above) neatly sums up the Trump administration attitude toward the coronavirus.   

Back on February 26, President Trump held a 54-minute press conference on the coronavirus. On March 2, 2020 at the Washington Post there was an article titled Inside Trump’s frantic attempts to minimize the coronavirus crisis.

On March 10, 2020 the conservative National Review finally had an editorial article titled President Trump needs to step up on the coronavirus. In the sixth paragraph they stated the obvious:

“….The failures of leadership at the top, however, show no sign of being corrected.  In a serious public-health crisis, the public has a right to expect the government’s chief executive to lead in a number of crucial ways: by prioritizing the problem properly, by deferring to subject matter experts when appropriate while making key decisions in informed and sensible ways, by providing honest and careful information to the country, by calming fears and setting expectations, and by addressing mistakes and setbacks.

Trump so far hasn’t passed muster on any of these metrics. He resisted making the response to the epidemic a priority for as long as he could – refusing briefings, downplaying the problem, and wasting precious time. He has failed to properly empower his subordinates and refused to trust the information they provided him – often offering up unsubstantiated claims and figures from cable television instead. He has spoken about the crisis in crude political and personal terms. He has stood in the way of public understanding of the plausible course of the epidemic, trafficking instead in dismissive clichés. He has denied his administration’s missteps, making it more difficult to address them.  

This presidential behavior is all too familiar. It is how he has gotten through scandals and fiascos for more than three years in office. But those were all essentially political in nature, and most were self-created. The country has been lucky in the Trump era, largely avoiding the sorts of major, unforeseen crises that make the greatest demands of the modern presidency. That luck has now run out, and this demands a new level of seriousness from the president and those around him.

President Trump needs to rise to this challenge. His partisan adversaries are sure he can’t. We hope he proves them wrong.”

If the Trump administration had bothered to ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) whether they had any advice about crisis communication, then they would have been pointed to lots of very useful information. CDC has a web page about Crisis and Emergency Communication (CERC) with a link to a 462-page manual (from 2014) and a succinct Pocket Card, (see page 174 in the manual) the front of which is shown above. Back on May 30, 2014 I blogged about Remembering what is important in crisis communication – the CDC CERC pocket or emergency card.

On December 31, 2019 there was an article by Daniel Dale at CNN Politics titled A month-by-month look at Donald Trump’s top lies of 2019. He counted over 2,700 false claims, or about 7.4 per day. Based on that record of not being right, I doubt that the president can become credible. Rather than listen to the president, I will look at the coronavirus page at the CDC web site for advice - including their Steps to Prevent Illness.

UPDATE March 13, 2020

On the evening of Wednesday March 11, 2020 President Trump spoke from the White House. An article on  March 12, 2020 at the Washington Post titled Ten minutes at the teleprompter: Inside Trump’s failed attempt to calm coronavirus fears described what happened:

“In the most scripted of presidential settings, a prime-time televised address to the nation, President Trump decided to ad-lib – and his errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the coronavirus.

Even Trump – a man practically allergic to admitting mistakes – knew he’d screwed up by declaring Wednesday night that his ban on travel from Europe would include cargo and trade, and acknowledged as much to aides in the Oval Office as soon as he’d finished speaking, according to one senior administration official and a second person, both with knowledge of the episode.

Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser who has seized control of some aspects of the government’s coronavirus response, reassured Trump that aides would correct his misstatement, four administration officials said, and they scrambled to do just that. The president also told staffers to make sure other countries did not believe trade would be affected, and even sent a cleanup tweet of his own: ‘The restriction stops people not goods,’ he wrote.

Other administration officials rushed to alert the public that U.S. citizens would be exempt from the travel ban, after scores of Americans, upon digesting Trump’s speech, phoned government offices and raced to airports in Europe out of concern that they would not be able to fly home.

Trump’s 10-minute Oval Office address Wednesday night reflected not only his handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways, much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads.

Futures for the Dow Jones industrial average fell in real time with virtually each word Trump uttered, signaling a lack of confidence among investors that he had control of the crisis and previewing another bloodbath once the markets opened Thursday morning.

Trump – who believed that by giving the speech he would appear in command and that his remarks would reassure financial markets and the country – was in ‘an unusually foul mood’ and sounded at times ‘apoplectic’ on Thursday as he watched stocks tumble and digested widespread criticism of his speech, according to a former senior administration official briefed on his private conversations.

This official, like many others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive information or make candid assessments.

Ben Rhodes, who served as a senior White House aide and helped former president Barack Obama script and manage his responses to numerous crises, predicted that Wednesday night’s address will stand as ‘the moment people associate with the fact that Donald Trump failed the biggest test of his presidency.’

‘I think we’ll look back on this as a defining moment of the Trump presidency because it speaks to larger concerns that people already had about Trump – that he can’t tell the truth, that he doesn’t value expertise, that he doesn’t take the presidency seriously enough,’ Rhodes said.”