It’s sometimes said you can predict the future by looking at the past and extending it. But the pandemic has scrambled the old trajectory. Maybe not completely, but close enough. All bets are off now.
Clearly, the pandemic has completely flummoxed Donald Trump. Kevin Drum points out that Trump is, literally, doing nothing at all about the pandemic.
Let’s review our president’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic:
* He has no plan for mass testing.
* He has already let everyone know he’s unenthusiastic about masks.
* He wants to “liberate” states from stay-at-home orders.
* He wants to open up non-essential businesses as soon as possible.
* He appears to have no particular opinion about social distancing, school closings, or large gatherings.
In other words, he literally has no concrete response to the pandemic at all, aside from closing our borders and passing along damaging fictions about vaccines and folk remedies.
Speaking as an armchair psychologist, my take on this is that Trump has absolutely no clue what he’s supposed to be doing about the pandemic, because it is utterly outside his very limited experience. And he is incapable of learning, so he’s not going to somehow salvage some initial mistakes with more proactive and effective policies. That would be like expecting a poodle to play the tuba.
Now Trump is flailing around trying to promote himself as a successful, tough-guy president without having accomplished anything to address the pandemic. His big strategy so far was a hail-mary pass — being the big hero who saves everyone with the miracle drug hydroxychloroquine! But after weeks of promotion, and after stockpiling 29 million pills, the hail mary turned into a fumble. So what’s next?
“Next” appears to be that Trump will revert to his original strategy of pretending his mightly mind-beams can just make the pandemic go away. There are reports he even wants to resume rallies.
But the lipstick-on-the-pig strategy is unlikely to work.
Donald Trump’s botched handling of the Covid-19 crisis has left the US looking like a “third world” country and on course for a second Great Depression, one of the world’s leading economists has warned.
In a withering attack on the president, Joseph Stiglitz said millions of people were turning to food banks, turning up for work due to a lack of sick pay and dying because of health inequalities.
The Nobel prize-winning economist said: “The numbers turning to food banks are just enormous and beyond the capacity of them to supply. It is like a third world country. The public social safety net is not working.”
I doubt most Americans grasp the depth of the trouble we’re in. There is still a lot of hope that in a month or two everything will go back to how it was. But that’s very unlikely. This disaster may be just getting started.
The November election is going to be a referendum on Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Trump is desperate for that to be otherwise, but there’s nothing he can do about it, or at least nothing he will do about it that won’t backfire. All other conventional wisdom is now cancelled. Republicans who assume turnout from Trump’s base will save them in November are in denial, as are lefties who are still arguing that Joe Biden can’t win without the progressive vote. It may barely matter who the Dem nominee is by November.
Do read Everyone is in denial about November by Daniel Drezner. In the face of the pandemic, Republican strategies about messaging and smearing Joe Biden for this or that issue just seem pathetic. “The important thing is that campaign tactics are meaningless when the administration has bungled its pandemic response and the economy is cratering,” Drezner writes.
The only thing that could save Trump is to successfully re-open the economy so that the pandemic is no longer an issue in November. His own incompetence has gotten in the way, however. The experts keep saying test! test! test! And Trump has washed his hands of tests. Instead he appears to be embarking on “Hail Mary 2.0: The Return to Prosperity.” Just push open the economy, now, without testing and tracing. Those governors who won’t comply might be subject to legal action from Attorney General Barr. The strategy appears to be to turn the pandemic restrictions into a red state versus blue state culture war issue, never mind that some Republican governors have seen the light about the restrictions.
But the public health experts say that reopening the economy prematurely will almost certainly result in another wave of virus deaths, possibly worse than the first wave. And as long as the virus is lurking out there, the crowds will not be returning to stadiums, shops, or restaurants even if they’re open. Some people, yes, but possibly not enough to turn a profit. And then when new cases flare up, the restrictions will have to be imposed again. See Matt Yglesias, Opening Up the Economy Won’t Save the Economy.
I have little hope that Trump won’t continue to screw up America. Trump doesn’t want to hear about the tests, possibly because even he suspects pandemic is more widespread than we know. Numbers might make him look bad! In his narrow little mind, mass testing is not in his self-interest.
But you can’t hide the reality of death. The officially recorded numbers of cases of and deaths from covid-19 are almost certainly lower than actual infections and deaths, but the low numbers are bad enough and going up fast. (I’ve added a link to the right-hand sidebar, right over the calendar, that provides a running update of the official number of infections and death by covid 19 in the U.S.. Checking the numbers daily is disturbing.)
There are signs that Trump’s support among seniors is eroding fast.
The latest Morning Consult poll found that 65-and-older voters prioritized defeating the coronavirus over healing the economy by nearly a 6-to-1 ratio. And over the past month, they’ve become the group most disenchanted with Trump’s handling of the crisis. In mid-March, seniors were more supportive of Trump than any other age group (plus-19 net approval). Now, their net approval of the president has dropped 20 points and is lower than any age group outside of the youngest Americans.
Those findings were matched by a new NBC/WSJ poll, which tested the presidential matchup between Trump and Joe Biden. Among seniors 65 and older, Biden led Trump by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent. That’s a dramatic 16-point swing from Hillary Clinton’s showing in the 2016 election; she lost seniors by 7 points to Trump (52-45 percent).
Trump allies have tried to tell seniors that they shouldn’t feel this way, but that hasn’t gone too well. For instance, Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, gamely tried to argue that grandparents should perhaps be prepared to sacrifice themselves rather than allow the economy to continue to tank.
The national backlash was fierce. And as one of the polls highlighted above shows, seniors continue to disagree in overwhelming percentages.
It may be that this debate just might not provide Trump with the culture-war tinderbox he thinks it does.
See also Trump loves to create chaos. But it can come back to bite him.
And do see Richard Stengel, Why Trump’s Coronavirus Optimism Isn’t Working.
The projection of optimism is a hallmark of great leaders, and FDR might have been our greatest model of that presidential virtue. But from the first he was clear that in times of crisis, optimism also required realism—realism in the form of honesty about the nature of the challenge itself. He understood that to engage a whole nation, he could not sugarcoat the task ahead. Optimism had to be earned. In President Donald Trump’s efforts to project optimism, he has been anything but candid and honest. To simply say, “We see light at the end of the tunnel,” without facts or data to back it up, is not optimism but dissembling. Optimism unaccompanied by realism is hollow. Trump’s optimism is more like that of the classic American species, “the confidence man,” the swindler who sells you a bill of goods and then moves on to the next sucker. Moreover, his optimism always seems self-serving, as though it is more about people rewarding him for being upbeat than how he is grappling with the crisis itself. As FDR said in the third paragraph of his inaugural address, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”
Trump sometimes tries to project seriousness and empathy, but he fails. He lacks genuine empathy or emotional intelligence. Further, Trump’s incessant self-pity and complaining about the way he is treated is totally out of keeping with great leadership, especially in a time of crisis.
Polls are saying that a significant majority of Americans are reluctant to rush into re-opening the economy. But some of Trump’s favorite governors are rushing in where angels fear to tread:
As several states — including South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida — rush to reopen businesses, the sudden relaxation of restrictions will supply new targets for the coronavirus that has kept the United States largely closed down, according to experts, math models and the basic rules that govern infectious diseases.
“The math is unfortunately pretty simple. It’s not a matter of whether infections will increase but by how much,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a leading epidemiologist at Columbia University.
And there is evidence the virus can spread through air conditioning systems. If true, this is going to be especially hard on the southern states.
This is going to be a year to remember. Stay safe.
U.S. President Donald Trump announces an agreement with Mexico on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at the White House in Washington, U.S., August 27, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque – RC1D94FA7CB0