Calamity Trump looks stuffed this time

It has been observed many times that contemporary American politics sometimes need viewing through the President’s eyes. That means viewing things through the eyes of a man who craves adoration and is couched in a New York sensibility of egotistical excess as well as shallow donate-your-way-into-society politicking. This is a man entirely fixated on messaging, branding, and, ultimately, self-affirmation. America as Trump. Trump as America.

The irony you’ll have perhaps spotted over these past three years is that the impact of Trump on the real world has been more benign than the headlines would often suggest.

Make no mistake, there have been hard points where his policies have caused real-world pain – whether it concerns migrant children held in cages, Turkey’s treatment of former Kurdish allies, a rebranding of the US judiciary, a rise in hate crimes, climate crisis denial in the face of record wildfires, his abandonment of Puerto Rico. But they have also induced a considerable systemic numbness.

No wars have been made. Not much has got done. Congress is stuck in stalemate. The Trump administration has been coasting, hoping that nothing would diminish their lucky momentum. Trump said a lot but did very little. He just hoped that the value of everybody’s 401k would get them to vote for him in November.

Then came the Coronavirus and it seemed to catch him at one of his many blind spots. The notorious germaphobe spent the critical early months dismissing it as seasonal flu. He notoriously said, “a lot of people think that goes away in April, with the heat that comes in.”

The science on that is still out. Trump might yet be right. We all hope he’s right. But, unfortunately, his unwillingness to look at the coughing, hacking, sputum-spewing reality of a feverish China gave him a false sense of reassurance.

Instead of preparing the nation, he wove the virus into his weltanschauung, his bizarre inner reality where everything merges with or proves a counter to his deepest obsessions. Coronavirus was only out to harm him as if the virus were taken from some futuristic William Gibson novel and had been genetically engineered to target only Trump.

This was the “Democratic hoax” picked up by his proxies in the media. Peter Hegseth, on Fox and Friends Weekends, said that Democrats are “rooting for the coronavirus to spread”, whilst Laura Ingram said that it was all a plan to “smear the administration”. “The coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” said the newly ennobled shock-jock, Rush Limbaugh.

Worst of all, the President’s own son – Donald Trump Junior. – appeared at CPAC and complained of Democrats: “For them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning, is a new level of sickness.”

Back in the world of reality, the virus didn’t care for sensibilities on either side of America’s political divide. It just carried on spreading and by the time it did reach America, it found a society still not ready.

Even as the experts gathered around the President at the first White House Press briefing to be held in a year, it was a peculiar affair. Senior government officials seemed to spend more time acknowledging the genius of the President than the severity of the problem.

Mike Pence became chief cheerleader to the man it’s suspected has slipped him the poison pill of overseeing the Coronavirus problem. If (perhaps when) the response fails, the Vice President will take the fall, conveniently paving the way for a new name at the bottom of November’s presidential ticket.

For all the talk of foresight, speed, and efficiency, in only the most perfunctory way could any of that be said to be true. Trump did impose travel bans, even if they were hard to spot among all the other travel bans it has become his habit to impose.

Yet crucial time was lost and continues to be lost. False narratives were spun in the media and, like the virus itself, followed patterns of community spread. It is still routine for Trump supporters to repeat the President’s mantra: that there is no need to worry. It is still a hoax. It is merely “Wuhan flu”, a name that reminds people that, again, this is a foreign menace. It isn’t Trump’s fault. Even when the world around them started to change this week, with major sports events cancelled, many have condemned the “mainstream media” for ruining the country.

This, ultimately, is Trump’s original sin when it comes to Corvid-19. As the name implies, the virus began to spread last year. Trump had months to prepare America for the eventuality that it would arrive on their shores. He didn’t. Instead, he worked hard to establish a counter-narrative that public health officials are now struggling to neutralise. It’s been left to the late-night talk show hosts to spread the message that shaking hands is no longer acceptable even as the President continued to shake hands.

Yesterday it was announced that the communications secretary to Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro now has the virus. He was photographed standing next to President Trump just days earlier. Bolsonaro, who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on the 7th March, then had tests. Now he has it too. The Trump administration continues to downplay the significance. The President won’t be tested.

There is, admittedly, only a small chance that Trump has caught the virus but that’s not the issue. The problem is that the President continues to use the highest office in the land to deny the reality that’s been unfolding around him.

This, ultimately, results in the fear seen in markets, where short term jitters needed to be calmed by reassurances about the long term. Instead, they see ambiguity and a president retweeting a picture of himself playing a violin tagged by a critic with the caption “My next piece is called nothing can stop what’s coming”. The Nero allusion was lost on the notorious germaphobe living in a peculiar state of denial and isolation. Instead, he said, “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”

Fortunately, the states do know what it means. They have organised around the growing peril. Where the federal response has been slow, local governments have filled in. It’s perhaps one of the few places where America’s system has shown some resilience, the often-combative federal-state duality working for once in its favour.

Meanwhile, today, the President returns to his favourite theme of attacking the very federal entity tasked with tackling the crisis. In a tweet about the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he blames the Obama administration.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1238410044263333894

All of that is highly dubious but, even if it were true, Trump has been President for months over three years now. There must come some point where something is his fault.

As the fiddler-in-chief strings his tiny violin to play tunes about re-election, victimisation, and the universal hoax that only he has the eyes – some are saying the best eyes – to see, it’s difficult for the rest of us to see how anything will now change.

This much was obvious when Trump finally sat down to address the American people from the Oval Office on Wednesday night. That was perhaps his chance to reset the situation as well a salvage his presidency. Instead, he looked constrained by events as he sniffed nervously and spoke of the “foreign virus”, again encapsulating in just a few words the denials that have characterised the past month of tanking markets and hesitant federal response.

Instead of looking at the virus’s spread inside America, Trump was still fixated on borders. He imposed travel bans instead of taking the necessary measures at home. Maintaining some notional sense of national purity meant more to him than accepting that bans are now meaningless. The coronavirus is everywhere. We all own it. We’re all in this together.