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A pandemic was raging in the United States, thousands were dead or dying, and the president was infected.
His name was Woodrow Wilson and a century ago he was in a similar position to the position Donald trump is now.
Only then had the illness that brought Mr. Wilson down been called the Spanish flu, not the coronavirus that has infected Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and more than seven million Americans.
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And when Wilson fell ill in April 1919 while in Paris negotiating an end to World War I, his wife, Edith, quickly intervened to make sure as few people as possible knew the president was ill.
“Wilson’s wife was able to hide her illness by creating a bubble around her,” Thomas Schwartz, a history professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, told NBC News.
“They explained that the disease came from overwork, something that people would have believed since Wilson was known to be a workaholic.”
Mrs. Wilson did the same a few months later when Mr. Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke and she stepped in to help run the country in the final days of her husband’s presidency.
Trump, on the other hand, announced via Twitter early Friday that he and the first lady had tested positive for COVID-19 and they self-isolated.
They were among 300,000 Americans who were infected with the coronavirus this week, the latest figures from NBC News showed.
Donald Trump leaves the White House for Walter Reed Military Hospital in Maryland
“It was a very different media environment back then,” said Professor Schwartz.
The first broadcast of news by radio in the United States did not happen for a year and most Americans got their news from newspapers that did not cover the president as closely or as critically as they do now, he said.
While the federal government and other institutions like Johns Hopkins University report daily how many people in the US have died from COVID-19 (209,103 deaths out of 7.3 million confirmed cases, based on the NBC News tally), most Americans in Wilson’s day did not understand how deadly the Spanish flu was.
It ended up killing 675,000 Americans and 20 to 40 million people around the world.
“In the context of World War I, President Wilson downplayed the 1918 pandemic that infected a quarter of Americans,” said Dr. Howard Koh, a Harvard University professor who was undersecretary for health and human services during the administration of President Barack Obama, said in an email.
“A century later, the deadliest pandemic since then has arrived at President Trump’s doorstep. Unfortunately, pretending that there is no pandemic will not do it.”
Wilson immunized himself from the harsh criticism Trump has received for his failed response to the coronavirus by simply not talking about the Spanish flu.
Woodrow Wilson contracted the Spanish flu
“Woodrow Wilson never made a public statement of any kind about the pandemic,” said Patrick Maney, a history professor at Boston College. “As a result, it is one of the lesser-known catastrophes of any kind.”
Not that Wilson would have listened if someone had told him to focus more on the pandemic and less on the war, said John Barry, author of The Great Flu: The Story of History’s Deadliest Pandemic.
“Like Trump, he did not tolerate criticism from friend or foe,” Barry said of Wilson in an interview with The New Yorker.
“All of this makes Wilson’s complete silence on the pandemic understandable in one context: it would do nothing to distract him or the nation from the war effort.”
Schwartz largely agreed. “Wilson faced some criticism for the way he handled the pandemic, but not at the level that Trump has,” he said.
“Part of the reason is that World War I really overshadowed the pandemic, somewhat diminishing the degree to which Wilson was criticized.”
Trump, who never served in the military, called himself a “wartime president” as the pandemic accelerated.
But he has also repeatedly downplayed the danger of COVID-19 and politicized recommended safety precautions, such as wearing masks, refusing to wear one in public until recently.
Trump’s base has not only taken avoidance signals from the mask of the president, but his family as well. And now, Trump himself has been the victim of his own false messages.
Additionally, a Cornell University study suggested that Trump was responsible for at least 38% of the COVID-19 misinformation that has hampered the public health response to this plague and sown so much confusion in the American public.
Among other things, Trump promoted unproven “miracle cures” for the coronavirus and claimed without any evidence that the pandemic was a “hoax by the Democratic Party” intended to derail his presidency.
Trump called himself a ‘war president’ during the pandemic
As the danger of the pandemic publicly lessened during daily briefings or campaign rallies where his supporters rarely wore masks or practiced social distancing, Trump was privately recorded telling journalist Bob Woodward in February that COVID-19 was ” something deadly. “
The result was a chaotic response to a crisis unfolding in a country where a large part of the population does not seem to understand that it is still in danger.
“Rather than heed the 1918 warnings, this country has continued to underestimate this virus, and we cannot allow that to continue any longer,” said Dr. Koh.
This article first appeared on NBC News.
