The Coronavirus-Denial Movement Now Has a Leader

“If in New York City, the most important city in the richest country in the world, they’re facing the calamity that they’re facing right now, you can imagine what could happen in much more vulnerable countries and their very large cities, like São Paulo, like Rio,” Sotero said. “We have many talented doctors in Brazil, but we don’t have an NIH with a Doctor Fauci counterpunching on television.”

“Bolsonaro is genuinely concerned about the impact a long quarantine would have on the economy, especially in a country like Brazil where so many people just barely get by on a day-to-day basis,” Brian Winter, the editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, told me in an email. “Street vendors can’t work from home.” That’s a tough balance to strike for any policy maker, Winter noted. About a quarter of the country’s population of more than 200 million live in poverty. “We know that deep recessions can kill people too,” he wrote.

As Bolsonaro has put it, “If we cower, opt for the easy discourse, everyone stays home, it will be chaos. No one will produce anything, there will be unemployment, refrigerators will go empty, no one will be able to pay bills.” Bolsonaro may also be seeking to dissociate himself from the stringent social-distancing measures that his government will have to adopt, so as to escape blame for the inevitable damage they’ll cause to Brazil’s already-troubled economy.

But Winter added that Bolsonaro’s motivations are probably ideological as well, and a function of his populism: “a refusal to take science seriously, to disregard whatever ‘the media’ says as a hostile elitist conspiracy, to reject the establishment generally.” Populists tend to bet that they can “create their own reality,” but “Bolsonaro is simply not going to stop a virus by insisting on Facebook that it’s no worse than a ‘little flu.’”

Trump has declined to criticize Bolsonaro for his coronavirus skepticism, but has not gone nearly as far as his Brazilian counterpart. In fact, Bolsonaro has been more extreme in his denialism than any world leader. Even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, another right-wing populist-nationalist, has ordered the largest lockdown in human history.*

Read: The callousness of India’s COVID-19 response

For now, Trump seems torn between the guidance of advisers seeking to avert a public-health catastrophe, and his own instincts to buck the experts in order to revive the economy, whose performance is central to his reelection. “The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success,” the president tweeted this week. “The real people want to get back to work ASAP.”

Bolsonaro’s handling of the outbreak illustrates what the United States could look like if Trump were to go all in on his argument that the cure is worse than the disease.

“I personally hope that Trump and Bolsonaro get to stand on a stage two months from now and have a big Make Brazil Great Again rally where they mock all the haters and snowflakes for blowing the virus out of proportion,” Winter told me. “Because that will mean we all got through this without tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths. But unfortunately I have my doubts.”

*This article originally misstated Narendra Modi’s position. He is the prime minister of India, not the president.

Uri Friedman is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering national security and global affairs.