Trump’s Coronavirus Snake Oil

The presidency of Donald Trump, like Trump’s long, sketchy run as a real estate princeling, is predicated on a wholly performative model of management. Just park a power-suited white man of a certain age—preferably, of course, the president himself—in front of a bank of microphones, a fawning Fox News correspondent, or a Weimar-style rally, and presto: The man of affairs looks for all the world to be on top of things that matter in our world. Never mind that, in all likelihood, he’s going to be whining about perceived celebrity slights, the Academy Awards, or NFL players taking a knee to protest anti-black violence—the whole point is to look to be impressively running things, even as the foundations of those very same things are crumbling around you.

And this is why the coronavirus crisis is such a dire threat to both the Trump presidency and the Trumpian sensibility. As New Republic features editor Ryu Spaeth argues, the spreading coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 3,000 lives and is now starting to reach the United States, is not the sort of easy culture-war sport that Trump can deride ad infinitum on Twitter. Trump’s unhinged press conference on the coronavirus threat earlier this week traded in blatant falsehoods about the pandemic’s outbreak and likely future course—asserting without evidence that it would abate with warmer weather and that the United States is ideally prepared to confront the threat, after Trump himself has largely gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s chain of command for such threats.

Even though that performance might seem like “typical Trump, spreading disinformation and spin like so much ink from a startled squid,” Spaeth writes, there’s also an all-too-plain whiff of panicked desperation in this latest fusillade of presidential lies—“a recognition on Trump’s part, through the apocalyptic swirl of his own paranoia, that the coronavirus represents a very real threat to his presidency.”

There is, first of all, the damage the pandemic’s spread has already wreaked upon the global economy—and, far more pressing, from Trump’s perspective, the American stock market:

The stock market has long stopped being a gauge of anything other than wealth capture by the well-to-do, and so naturally Donald Trump is watching: He tweeted on Wednesday that CNN and MSNBC “are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets.”

Trump’s bid to bring the coronavirus crisis under focused White House management likewise exuded clueless desperation on a breathtaking scale. The president named Vice President Mike Pence, a science-averse evangelical, to captain the American government’s response to a disease that, in order to be combatted effectively, will need to draw on a massive mobilization of research and federal resources. How ill-suited is Pence to such a task? Well, consider both his record in office and the anemic federal health bureaucracy he’s now tasked with whipping into shape. As Spaeth writes, Pence’s “last attempt to contain a health crisis, an AIDS outbreak in his home state of Indiana, was compromised by his cruel and stupid opposition to a clean needle exchange program, on the premise that the needles would encourage more drug use.” Indeed, “Pence’s record in turn reminds us that the administration has a problem with basic literacy when it comes to issues of health and science, which will become only more strikingly apparent in the event of an epidemic. The Trump administration had previously proposed cuts to the CDC that would have been ‘unsafe at any level of enactment,’ according to former CDC head Tom Frieden, and would have made Americans ‘less safe.’”

In short, Spaeth observes, “this is Trump’s worst nightmare: an invisible, changeable foe whose potential destruction of his presidency cannot be blamed on his enemies or written off as fake news.” And needless to say, the coronavirus’s unyielding exposure of Trumpian crisis management as so much gilded playacting means that the whole emergency is an exponentially greater nightmare for the rest of us. This isn’t just another episode of The Apprentice—and it sure as hell isn’t a drill.

—Chris Lehmann, Editor