Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Trump shakes hands with Richard Ashworth, president of Walgreens, after declaring a national emergency at a press conference in the Rose Garden, March 13, 2020.
Donald Trump has said many things that leave us stunned or outraged, so many that most fade from memory. But a few—the ones that encapsulate something profound and true about him or the world that allowed him to become what he is—stay lodged in our minds. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” “Grab them by the pussy.” “I would like you to do us a favor though.”
To those, we can add this one: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
That’s what the president said on Friday when asked about his government’s response to the coronavirus, particularly the lack of testing that has been such a problem. It was, like many of the things Trump says, only a vivid reiteration of what we already understood, in this case that Trump will always take credit for anything good that happens and shift blame for anything bad that happens (usually to Barack Obama).
But this crisis—which is really two crises in one, a public health crisis that will almost inevitably be followed by an economic crisis—may be the one he can’t spin or distract from, the one in which the devotion of his base and the terrified support of congressional Republicans will not protect him. It’s too big, too real, and too concrete. When all the histories of this presidency are written, this may be the key moment, when the bottom fell out of the Trump presidency.
We might call it “Trump’s Katrina,” but before long we may be calling Katrina “Bush’s coronavirus.”
We can’t know for sure, of course. Liberals watch Trump’s surreal press conferences, in which he insists that all his decisions have been brilliant and the virus will soon be just a memory then tells one lie after another, and say to themselves, “How can anybody believe him?” Then they see that his base is not only unwavering in its support but clings to the fictional world he creates with a desperate intensity.
This evolving failure is nothing less than the culmination of the Trump presidency, when all his managerial deficiencies and personal pathologies came together with tragic results.
To wit: An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken from March 11-13 found that 56 percent of Democrats said their day-to-day lives will change in a major way because of the virus, but only 26 percent of Republicans agreed. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said they planned to stop attending public gatherings, but only 30 percent of Republicans said the same. And of course, almost nine in ten Republicans said they have confidence in Trump’s ability to handle the crisis—despite what they see on the news every day.
That could change. We’re likely at a point where the number of cases and the number of deaths are about to increase dramatically as the exponential curve of infection shoots upward. After that will come the shock to the economy, and to listen to what economists and analysts are saying, it’s almost impossible to overstate how serious the situation will become. As The Washington Post reported, “The United States is suffering the most abrupt and widespread cessation of economic activity in its history, hurtling toward a recession that could mean lost jobs, income and wealth for millions of Americans.”
There are certain situations that sooner or later become immune to spin or bluster or bombast, and that’s one of them. And it’s important to remember that while Trump has a core of supporters that will never abandon him no matter what happens, he also got millions of votes from people who essentially said, “What the hell, why not give this guy a try?”
Many if not most of them have mixed feelings about Trump to this day. They may think he’s a repugnant human being or at least a clown, but they’ve also thought that since the economy has been strong, it’s no big deal if he spends his days watching Fox News and angrily tweeting about his enemies. But if the economy tanks, they’re unlikely to be so generous.
Speaking of Fox, they and the rest of the conservative media are right now in the midst of a transition, from telling their audiences that the virus is being overblown by Democrats and the media in an effort to hurt Trump, to telling them that it’s a real problem that only Trump’s masterful leadership is saving us from.
But there’s only so long they can convince people not to believe what’s happening in their own lives and their own communities—or at least convince more than the minority of the population still fervently committed to Trump.
Should he lose his reelection bid, Republicans will quickly work to rewrite history to make him a momentary aberration in their party’s history for which they bear no responsibility. The ones who have been so united behind Trump will protest that he was never a true Republican, and they had nothing to do with his misdeeds. It will be a new version of what happened after 2008, when George W. Bush left office with approval ratings dipping into the 20s, and suddenly one Republican after another claimed they never liked him in the first place because he didn’t cut federal spending.
The coronavirus will be their justification. I was only reluctantly with Trump because he cut taxes and appointed conservative judges, they’ll say. But that coronavirus debacle? That was it for me. I always knew he couldn’t handle a crisis.
The rest of us will know that this evolving failure is nothing less than the culmination of the Trump presidency, when all his managerial deficiencies and personal pathologies came together with tragic results.
Or at least we should. Perhaps the best will happen, and all the measures now being taken—the shutting down of schools, the suspension of public gatherings, the commitment of people to stay home—will limit transmission to a level our dysfunctional health system can handle. Perhaps the economic damage will be serious but temporary. Perhaps the government’s response will improve.
Should that rosiest of scenarios come to pass, this will be nothing more than one more episode in the long story of Donald Trump’s incompetent and malevolent rule, and not the crisis that defines it. We can hope. But right now, it looks far more likely that this will be the moment that everything we worried about, everything we feared, everything we dreaded came true, with catastrophic results. None of us can say we never saw it coming.
