Talking politics at a time like this is tricky, but politics has made the coronavirus more deadly, and it will take politics to bring us back after the death and destruction passes.

Until last week, when Donald Trump had to cave and show that he had been wrong all along about the pandemic, he had portrayed this deadly virus like every other political opponent he has faced. He played to the darkest corners of his base, the government haters and science doubters and those who distrust knowledge.

It surely was not science or knowledge that Trump relied on in February when he said, “When you have 15, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” By the middle of last week, the United States had over 200,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths.

In March, Trump said, “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. We — they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.” That was not based on science or knowledge. That was pure political theater. We still do not have the tests we need.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser at the World Health Organization, told The New York Times that testing is vital to combat the virus, because, “You can’t stop it if you can’t see it.” That is science and knowledge talking.

And, as Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke wrote in the Harvard Business Review last week, testing would tell us who is sick, how many ventilators we need and where we need them, and when we can ease social distancing and start rebuilding our economy.

In February, at a political rally, Trump ignored science and knowledge and claimed that Democrats were “politicizing” the coronavirus issue. “This is their new hoax,” he said. And he blamed the global panic over the coronavirus on a press that was in “hysteria mode.”

It was his usual political pettiness, except that now, his pettiness will be the death of us. There are over a million coronavirus cases worldwide and 55,000 deaths. That is not a hoax or cause for unfounded hysteria.

In the end, Trump could not bluster or ridicule or insult the coronavirus away. He could not buy it off or scare it away with lawyers’ letters. He could not call it by a schoolyard nickname until it skulked away. None of his usual tactics worked.

So here’s our task, and while it is little help now, it is what we owe all those who come after us. We need to start the remembering right now.

We must remember that all Americans deserve better than this. We must remember that our American values are more important than any single policy or politician of the moment.

We must remember that, while this is going to be very bad, it could have been less bad, but that would have required respect for science and knowledge.

And we must remember that most Americans turn to government when there is no place else to turn. And when government is not there for us, we are doomed.

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