Program Note: I will be taking some time off this week, so for the next three days I will be running old columns. All will be looking back five years, as tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 to be a pandemic. The Washington Post ran an article over the weekend with a number of their staffers sharing their pandemic memories (including one from someone who was in high school at the time and was robbed of all the normal activities of her senior year).

Today I'm going to run the article I wrote almost exactly five years ago, which was written in the midst of the stock market collapsing and is full of speculation about what we could all expect in the near future (almost all of which eventually turned out to be true). Our political leadership vacillated from being non-existent to incredibly self-defeating and destructive during this time, as Donald Trump tried mightily just to close his eyes and wish us out of the crisis. And we all know how that turned out.

So here is the start of my three-day look back at the pandemic, starting right at the point it began spiraling completely out of control.

Originally published March 9, 2020

Roman Emperor Nero didn't actually fiddle while Rome burned. It's a myth. Violins (or "fiddles") wouldn't exist for another 1,500 years or so, making the very concept impossible. That's not to say Nero might not have blatantly ignored a flaming crisis, of course, it's just quibbling about the literal meaning of the maxim. Now, American Emperor-With-No-Clothes Donald Trump didn't fiddle while the country was hit by a pandemic, either. Instead, he played golf. Twice. That's right -- in the midst of a huge crisis, Trump spent the entire weekend playing golf.

The stock market reacted Monday morning by dropping a further 2,000 points. This puts it down over 5,500 points from its all-time high less than a month ago. The reason I begin with this statistic is because it is one of two (the other being the unemployment rate) that we know Trump actually pays attention to. So I'm anticipating some wild flailing from the White House in the next 24 hours or so, because Trump dearly wants to run his entire re-election campaign on how great the economy is doing. If the coronavirus puts that at risk (as, indeed, it already has), then Trump will reluctantly have to make some sort of attempt to deal with the situation. Knowing Trump, it'll probably be the wrong thing to do; but to Trump the only thing that's important is whether Wall Street investors see him "doing something" and are calmed enough to stop the financial panic.

The problem for Trump is that all of the remedies available to any president to quell economic crises are pretty ill-suited to deal with a medical crisis. COVID-19 isn't going to care whether interest rates are low, or how taxes could be cut, to put it another way. It's going to keep right on infecting people no matter what Larry Kudlow or Steve Mnuchin has to say on television.

The only real thing that could introduce some semblance of calm would be for the federal government to appear to have an intelligent action plan in place, a solid team of professionals in charge, and contingency plans for any possible worsening of the crisis. Since that is all but impossible to expect from the Trump administration, we can probably look forward to more mixed messages and outright lies from the government, led by Prevaricator-in-Chief Trump. Trump seems to consider the entire crisis to be one of P.R. alone, to be solved by a bunch of happy talk and outright denial of the seriousness of the situation. The administration does actually have some competent medical professionals working on the crisis, but they know that anything they say to the public could easily be contradicted by Trump within hours, which only serves to increase confusion and fear, instead of tamping it down. This puts them in a rather impossible situation, and many of them have fallen back on merely issuing praise for the Dear Leader rather than admit the truth to the public and have Trump contradict them anyway.

Trump has finally met a crisis he couldn't bamboozle into going away, to put it bluntly. I've already heard the phrases: "Trump's Katrina" and (even worse): "Trump's Chernobyl" being used to describe the almost-inevitable political fallout which is just around the corner. We'll see whether it reaches those levels, but it's pretty obvious already that this is going to change the entire tenor of the presidential campaign. If there even is one -- when large gatherings of people become taboo, will either Trump or the Democrats really continue to hold large political rallies?

There are some next steps that could be taken which might actually work, but they are routinely described as "Draconian" due to their severity. Could America really quarantine an entire state or major metropolitan area? China did, and it likely stopped the outbreak from spreading even further. But we don't have an authoritarian system of government, so American citizens would probably react differently if, for instance, Washington state was cut off at the borders. Or anywhere else with a concentrated outbreak. Japan is already having professional sports teams play before empty stadiums, but would Americans really accept such at thing? And for how long?

It may even be too late. Even the most drastic measures may prove to be ineffectual. Given how far the virus has already spread in this country, it may now be uncontainable. Which means the numbers are only going to climb higher, no matter what policy is enforced. Draconian measures could halt the spread of the virus so things don't get worse faster, but that's hard to quantify, really.

Americans are -- or used to be, at any rate -- capable of self-sacrifice in times of crisis. Talk to anyone who was alive during World War II, they'll tell you all about rationing and the rest of it. But we haven't really done such large-scale things since then, with the possible exception being the Cold War preparations for nuclear war. Few people alive today have ever had to deal with widespread disruption of everyday life, plain and simple. Which means there will be a lot of resistance to any such proposal. People will call it all a vast overreaction and simply not necessary. And they'll be cheered on by Trump himself, who seems desperate to downplay what is happening right in front of his face. This could be the first time in American history when a medical problem took on clear political dimensions. Or the first time since the AIDS crisis, at any rate.

Trump has already done everything he can to politicize the crisis -- going out of his way in each and every public appearance he makes on the coronavirus to try to assign blame and heap scorn on Democrats (Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Democratic governors, Barack Obama, etc., etc., etc.). Trump confidently predicted during the first of these appearances that the numbers of infected people in America would soon be at "zero," which was laughably untrue when he said it and is now even more provably untrue. Trump didn't want the infected cruise ship to dock and discharge passengers, because that would make "the numbers" look worse for him. His obsession with the number of people infected is bound to be short-lived, however, because sooner or later he'll get tired of seeing it climb so high and he'll just come right out and say that he thinks the whole "counting people who are sick" thing is "a hoax."

Luckily for Democrats, all they have to do to benefit politically from the situation is to sit back and hold Trump's coat while he continues to repeatedly shoot himself in both feet. All Democratic candidates for office really need say to voters is: "Wouldn't it be nice to return to competence in government?" That's it. Make the argument that electing competent and compassionate leaders is really the best thing to do, and the rest of the political argument takes care of itself. Just stand back and radiate competence, and let the voters see the plain difference to those in charge right now.

This isn't the first time during Trump's presidency that he was faced with a crisis that he couldn't fix just by denying reality on television and on Twitter. Hurricane Maria was also such a crisis. Luckily for Trump, though, it only devastated Puerto Rico -- which most Americans couldn't find on a map if their lives depended on it. This one is going to be different, though. This one is going to affect pretty much everybody in one way or another. Cancelled vacations or business trips, cancelled sports contests for both students and professional athletes, cancelled festivals and celebrations, fear of large crowds, panic-buying at the store, new "handshake" protocols such as elbow-bumping -- all of these have already happened to some extent, and we're just getting started. Of course, Trump is insulated from much of this, but he does watch the stock market, and the stock market is predicting even worse days ahead.

You know, at this point even trying to figure out how Trump will react to continuing bad news is pretty scary, since he's shown little interest so far in actually understanding what is going on. Who knows what impulsive rabbit he'll chase down a hole next? Perhaps this weekend wasn't a bad thing, in other words. Perhaps the best thing for America right now is to have Trump spend every day out on the golf course. Maybe that would be the most reassuring thing for the public to see.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant