Trump Is a Super-Spreader of Disinformation

A super-spreader—a term we didn’t much use nine months ago—is a person with a contagious disease who gives it to a lot of other people. In the coronavirus pandemic, super-spreaders have played an outsize role. Scientists have identified super-spreaders who have infected dozens of people with the virus, while others with the illness haven’t infected anyone at all. Super-spreaders may explain why the coronavirus seems to take over so quickly in some places, but not in others.

We don’t know yet whether President Donald Trump was a super-spreader of the coronavirus or the victim of one, perhaps at the Rose Garden event for the Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, where few wore masks and many shook hands; perhaps while he was preparing to about himself to New York tabloids, who , who . As a candidate, he lied about Barack Obama’s birth certificate; he declared falsely that Ted Cruz’s father had helped ; he invented a story about “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims on 9/11. As president, he has lied about so many things that even the nation’s most assiduous fact-checkers have had trouble keeping up.