“Bolsonaro, Trump and Johnson: these are men you wouldn’t put in charge of containing an outbreak of acne,” writes Ferdinand Mount, former head of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street policy unit, in the London Review of Books.
It is a shocking story. The US, UK and Brazil weren’t among the first countries hit by Covid‑19, so they had time to prepare. Admittedly, the health of ordinary Americans isn’t a Republican priority, but the US still spends as much on public healthcare as other developed countries. Add in private healthcare, and it spends more than any society in history. Yet American and Brazilian cases of Covid-19 are soaring as Europe’s and China’s fall, while the UK has one of Europe’s highest excess mortality rates. Within the US, states with ample time to prepare – Florida, Texas, Arizona – are now in full pandemic. Their governors, like Donald Trump, initially claimed to be prioritising the economy over the virus. Instead, they mismanaged both. Few people will risk dangerous illness to get a haircut.
All these places are ruled by mediagenic rightwing nationalists sceptical of credentialled experts. So are badly hit India, Russia and Belarus. A conventional social democracy can also mismanage Covid-19, as Sweden did, but it’s rarer. Why has this new category of leader got the virus wrong?