What
Trump’s Positive Coronavirus Test Means for the Presidential Campaign
By Eric Lach
October 2, 2020
In 1981, after Ronald
Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig,
gave an infamous press conference at the White House in which, to a roomful of
clamoring reporters and a television audience of millions, he shakily, and erroneously,
declared himself the acting President. “I am in control here,” Haig said. In
the early hours of Friday morning, after Donald
Trump tweeted out that he and his wife had tested positive for
the coronavirus, there was no singular Haig-like
figure, but, in keeping with our atomized age, Twitter exploded, people
suddenly channelling their own inner Haig, trying to meet a dangerous,
destabilizing national situation with whatever personal reaction they believed
the moment demanded. “Holy shit” was a popular choice. The reality is that for
as much as the country’s circumstances before Thursday night were
unprecedented—a pandemic raging, hundreds of thousands dead, tens of millions
out of work, family and friends isolated from one another, protests and political
violence in the streets, businesses big and small bleeding cash, wildfires and
hurricanes battering towns and cities, and the integrity of the upcoming
election under attack by the President—there is even less precedent for them
now.
On
Friday morning, reporters were beginning to fill in some details. According to
the Times, Hope Hicks, one of Trump’s closest advisers, began
experiencing symptoms of covid-19
while at a Trump campaign rally in Minnesota, on Wednesday. (A day earlier,
Hicks had accompanied Trump to his debate with Joe
Biden, in Ohio.) After Trump gave a shorter-than-usual speech, Hicks
quarantined in a cabin separate from the rest of the passengers on the flight
home on Air Force One. “She exited from the back of the plane,” the Times noted,
“as opposed to the front.”
On
Thursday, she tested positive, but the White House made no public announcement
about Hicks’s situation. Instead, Trump flew to New Jersey to attend a fund-raiser
and give a speech, in which he said, “The end of the pandemic is in sight.” He
had a full day of public events scheduled for Friday, too, including a rally in
Florida. But, on Thursday evening, Bloomberg News reported on Hicks’s
diagnosis; by the end of the night, Trump was acknowledging, in an interview
with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, that he was waiting on test results. Shortly
after 1 a.m., Trump tweeted
that both he and the First Lady, Melania Trump, had tested positive. It’s not
clear how or where or when the Trumps were infected, or how widespread the
virus may be in the White House. “He’ll be O.K., the doctor’s optimistic,” a
White House official told NPR. “He’ll get
treatment. We’re in a pretty good place to treat this.” The official added,
perhaps remembering Haig, “From a continuity standpoint—listen, we’ll be fine,
we’ll figure out a way to do it.” According to NPR, the White House is planning
for Trump to be under quarantine for as long as fourteen days. For now, the
President’s in-person Friday events have been cancelled, although he is still
scheduled to host a phone call on “covid-19
support to vulnerable seniors.”
If
the White House sticks to that timeline, it means that, at least for half the
time remaining before Election Day, Trump will have to suspend the campaign
rallies that he had been holding regularly. For the past five years, these
rallies have been where Trump demonstrates his mythic connection with his base.
Lately, they were also often held over the protests of local officials in
various states, who viewed them as potential public-health risks. Have we seen
the last of them? Trump’s quarantine may also mean the cancellation or
postponement of the second debate between Trump and Biden, which is scheduled
for October 15th.
The
larger question is what this development means for Trump’s hopes for
reëlection, or at least his ability to control and influence what chances he
has left, as he is trailing Biden in both the polls and in fund-raising. In
recent weeks, as the election models all started to suggest the overwhelming
probability of a Biden victory, one common caution has been that unforeseen
events are just that, unforeseen, and that elections tend to turn near their
end. Just this week, we’ve had what feels like a decade’s worth of “October
surprises”: the Times’ bombshell exposé on Trump’s taxes;
Trump’s belligerent debate performance, in which he declined to denounce white
supremacy; audio tapes of Melania Trump bemoaning as personal headaches the
facts of separated migrant families and White House Christmas decorations; the
former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s detention by law enforcement
after an altercation with his wife; and revelations about the Trump campaign aide
Kimberly Guilfoyle’s alleged harassment of an assistant during her time at Fox
News. Trump’s positive test is
an enormous unforeseen event, but to the extent that his reëlection campaign
has had a strategy these past few months, it has been to insist that the
coronavirus crisis was ending; that he had done a great job in combating it;
and that, in any case, it was not (or had not been) a big deal. His refusal to
acknowledge the scale of the pain and suffering in the country had left him
unable to muster patriotic praise for the victims, or for the doctors, nurses,
and other essential workers who have risked their lives since March to help
others. It was a campaign of negation—and now he’s tested positive.
Much
could change in the next few days. Trump could experience a relatively mild course of infection—easily
carrying out his duties in quarantine—or his case may quickly take a turn for
the worse. “We will get through this TOGETHER!” Trump tweeted on Friday
morning. This is the kind of perfunctory sentiment you might have expected from
a President in March. Trump could only think to deploy it now, when he himself
was a victim. Which “this” was he referring to?
There
are questions for Biden, too. The former Vice-President spent ninety minutes on
Tuesday night standing a few feet from Trump as he ranted and raved during the
debate. Was Trump contagious then? Biden’s team has already asked a reporter who travelled on Air Force
One on Wednesday not to travel with the Democratic campaign on a planned swing
through Michigan on Friday, and reports indicate that
Biden plans to take a coronavirus test. Meanwhile, election-law professors—the
kinds of people who have lately been discussing the possibilities of a
drawn-out or contested election next month—are bringing up the murky rules that would
govern a scenario in which either of the major parties was forced to replace a
Presidential candidate at the last minute. Voting has already begun in a number
of states, and millions of Americans have already cast their ballots. The
election is already here. The President has contracted the life-threatening
virus he has spent the better part of a year downplaying, lying about, and
stoking division over. The questions will likely outnumber the answers for some
time to come.