Last week, President Trump said at both a rally and during an interview that 85% of people wearing masks get Covid-19. The CDC study in question said no such thing. What it found was that among people who were tested because they were experiencing symptoms, self-report of mask wearing "often or always" was not a predictor of whether they would indeed be negative or positive. Various summaries of the study can be found at CNN and other national news sites, so I won't address the details here. The summaries are quite clear and include interviews with the doctors who wrote the paper.
At the rally, Trump said, "Did you see the CDC? That 85% of the people wearing a mask catch it, okay?" This was a gross and false misrepresentation of the study, but because it was Trump, the lie didn't even make me blink. He was obviously spouting nonsense. What gave me pause was thinking about how the lie originated. What were the processes and mechanisms by which this lie was told to millions during the NBC town hall after the president had tried it out on a rally audience? I decided to sit down and calmly create an outline for how these words made it on air.
The Provenance of a Lie
My first question is, "How did the president become aware of this study?" I doubt that this study was part of any daily security briefing. I doubt that the president was talking to some CDC administrators who mentioned it. I find it highly unlikely that he read the original journal article. It's not likely that anyone on the task force, who presumably would understand the study, would point it out as supportive of no-mask arguments, unless of course Dr. Scott Atlas had an eye out for such things. Who else in Trump's inner circle would be surveying current studies in search of some idiosyncratic line or two that could be torturously misinterpreted and twisted as a kind of lame evidence for not wearing masks?
The study came from the Health Data Services Center at Vanderbilt. How was the president alerted to the study? Who pointed it out to him? My speculative guesses are that it might have been Dr. Atlas or one of the researchers at Fox News.
The next questions regarding the processing of the lie are more interesting. Once the study was mentioned to him, did President Trump read it? I find that highly unlikely. Did he read the abstract or a summary of the study, or at least read its conclusion? If he had read any of these, then presumably he would have understood that the study was not about "85% of people who wear masks get Covid-19." Now I suppose it is possible that the president could have read the abstract or conclusion and not at all understood them, but this seems farfetched. And if he didn't understand them, why would he use the line? So I am going with the theory that in all likelihood President Trump did not read the study, or the abstract, or conclusion, or a summary of the study.
The most likely sequence of events is that the president was told of the study, did not read it in part or whole, and then did not think it prudent to ask anyone about it, including task force members who would, presumably again, set him straight regarding the gist of the study.
The plot thus far: Someone tells President Trump about the study, then invents and emphasizes the odd incorrect line Trump eventually uses in a rally and during a televised interview. The president takes the person's word for the accuracy of the lie, does not vet the information with anyone else who would be able to verify it or shoot it down, and makes the decision to use the line at the rally and then in the interview.
Now it becomes even stranger. President Trump uses the line, which is a complete mischaracterization of the study, at a North Carolina afternoon rally. His people, his family, all hear it, but nobody thinks to vet the line and verify it. So the president goes blithely forward and trots it out at the televised town hall, where he is informed by the moderator that he is misinformed.
The misinformation being introduced to the president, not vetted by the president, and then nationally promulgated all have consequences, none of them good for anyone's health.
The Why of the Lie
The next questions regarding this lie are about motives, the why of the lie. Why would anyone point out this kind of misinformation to the president? Whoever introduced Trump to the study must have pushed the false line about "85% who wear masks get Covid-19." Why do it? Why send the president out in public with a lie that makes him sound like he knows absolutely nothing? Or did the president know that it was a con line the whole time, and did he know this while feeding it to his rally attendees and then a national television audience? Does President Trump think Americans are dumb and would buy the line, or did he actually believe the line because it fit the narrative he wanted to push?
The president not vetting the line suggests that he doesn't care about truth even if the falsehoods can kill. The person who fed him the study and the line also cares nothing for truth or the consequences of its lack. And those in the Trump camp who heard him use the line at the rally evidently did not or could not dissuade him from using it at the later town hall interview.
At each step in the provenance and distribution of this lie, a proper accurate interpretation of the study was tossed out the window and consequences were ignored. Anyone intervening at any point could have derailed the lie. No one did.
Cost/Benefits of this Lie
How does a lie like this, which has really limited utility for the liar, evade disconfirmation? Why does such a lie, with marginal value, get used when life threatening consequences result if people buy into it?
I can't imagine that a lie with such marginal pluses for the liar but so negative in potential outcomes for the public would have made it into a national interview in any other presidential campaign in my lifetime. The basic problem here is the devaluation of the lives of supporters, who are most likely to buy the lie without researching it. The disdain for supporters must be severe. Why throw such a lie out into public when the political benefits are nominal and the costs potentially deadly, specifically to one's own supporters?
This was a case of really bad cost/benefit accounting practices that our president should surely understand. What the provenance of this particular lie demonstrates is the propensity of the president's team to use any piece of questionable information, any quote, to further an agenda by inches. What's at risk are lives, especially of supporters, when these false throwaway lines get inserted into national interviews. By any previous American cultural leadership standards, this cost/benefit calculus would be considered sadistic with a touch of psychotic.
Bob Dietz
October 21, 2020
