Trump Is Giving Up
Against
both the coronavirus and Joe Biden, the president’s strategy increasingly
accepts defeat.
By Ross Douthat
Opinion
Columnist
- Oct. 20, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
Donald Trump can still win the 2020
presidential election; something that has a 10 percent or 15 percent chance of
happening can certainly transpire. But even more than in 2016, if the president
wins this time, we will have to attribute his victory to the workings of divine
providence (don’t worry, I have that column pre-written), because what we’re
watching is an incumbent doing everything in his power to run up his own margin
of defeat.
Start with his re-election messaging,
to the extent that you can discern such a thing. In 2016, Trump’s campaign was
shambolic and punctuated by self-inflicted disasters, but his message against
Hillary Clinton, like his message against the Republican establishment in the
primaries, had a simplicity and consistency: She supported bad trade deals; she
supported stupid wars; she sold the country out to special interests and
foreign governments; vote for her and you get more closed factories, more
soldiers dead or crippled, more illegal immigration, more power to Wall Street
and Washington, D.C.
In 2020, on the other hand, the Trump
campaign has been stuck toggling back and forth between two very different
narratives. One seeks to replay the last campaign, portraying Joe Biden as the
embodiment of a failed establishment (hence all the references to his 47 years
in Washington) who will sell out American interests to China as soon as he’s
back in power (hence the attempts to elevate Hunter Biden’s
influence-peddling).
But the other
narrative goes after Biden as though the Democrats had actually nominated
Bernie Sanders, insisting that his advancing age makes him a decrepit vessel
for the radical left, a stalking horse not just for Kamala Harris but also for
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and antifa.
A truly brilliant campaigner might be
able to weave these two narratives together, but on the lips of Donald Trump
their contradictions are evident. The resulting incoherence just feeds his
tendency to return to old grudges and very online grievances, as though he’s
running for the presidency of talk radio or his own Twitter feed. Without Steve
Bannon to keep him grounded or Clinton to keep him focused, he’s making a
closing “argument” that’s indistinguishable from a sales pitch for a TV show or
a newsletter — suggesting that even more than four years ago, the president
assumes he’ll be in the media business as soon as the election returns come in.
But the messaging failure is just the
surface; it’s on policy where Trump has really acted like a Black Sox
ballplayer trying to throw the World Series. There are two major issues for voters
in this election: the pandemic and the economy. Trump’s numbers on handling the
virus are lousy, but his numbers on handling the economy are still pretty good,
presumably thanks to both the memory of where the unemployment rate stood
before the coronavirus hit and the fact that the flood of Covid-19 relief
spending kept people’s
disposable income up.
This context suggested an obvious fall
campaign strategy: Push more relief money into the economy, try to
ostentatiously take the pandemic seriously and promise the country that
mask-wearing and relief dollars are a bridge to a vaccine and normalcy in 2021.
Instead Trump has ended up with the
opposite approach. He mostly ignored the negotiations over relief money for
months, engaging only at a point where he had become so politically weak that
both Republican deficit hawks (or the born-again variety, at least) and
Democratic free-spenders assume he’ll soon be gone. And meanwhile he’s let
himself be drawn ever deeper — especially since his own encounter with the
disease — into the libertarian style of Covid-19 contrarianism, which
argues that we’re overtesting, overreacting and probably close to herd immunity
anyway.
There is a mild contrarianism
that makes important points: The lockdown approach wasn’t sustainable and can’t
be reimposed, most elementary schools should be open because the risks of
spread seem pretty low, the virus is less deadly than the initial worst-case
projections suggested, and deaths as a share of cases are going down with
better treatment.
But the strong version keeps being
wrong. First, the past two months have made it clear that herd immunity is a
moving target: You can achieve it provisionally under social-distancing
conditions, but once people relax and start socializing again, the threshold
changes, and suddenly you get a renewed spike. This is what happened across
Europe, which crushed its case rates in the late spring, returned to more
normal life in the summer — and then reaped an early-fall wave that’s now fully
out of control, including in countries like Belgium that were hit intensely in
the first go-round.
Meanwhile, just because tests reveal
more mild cases doesn’t mean the virus has stopped killing people. Over and
over again, case numbers spike and deaths lag and contrarians talk about how
the virus is just a “casedemic” — and then a few weeks go by, and deaths follow
cases up. It happened in the United States over the summer, it’s happened in
Europe in the past month, and now it’s probably about to happen here again: Our
cases have been rising since early September, our hospitalizations have been
rising for several weeks, and while deaths are flat for now (at “only” 711
Americans a day), it’s likely they’ll be rising again by the time we hit
November.
Which means that Trump has chosen to go
to war with the idea of testing, with Dr. Anthony Fauci and
with “experts” in general at precisely the moment when the fall wave they’ve
been warning about seems to be showing up — which is also the moment when
the two-thirds of Americans who
describe themselves as “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the virus will be
going to the polls.
Strictly as a policymaking matter, this
is Trump’s worst behavior since his springtime push for the fastest-possible
reopening. Europe’s renewed crisis shows that the Western failure to contain
the virus is much more than just a Trump problem — but on the
margins, in the thousands if not the hundreds of thousands, Trumpian denial can
still get Americans unnecessarily killed.
As politics, meanwhile, even more than
the mixed messaging on Biden and the missed opportunities on relief spending,
the retreat to corona-minimizing is a case study in how the Trump of 2020 has
ceded his biggest general-election advantage from 2016 — his relative distance
from the ideological rigidities of the anti-government right — and locked
himself into a small box with flatterers and cranks.
From these follies
the God of surprises might yet deliver him. But every decision of his own
lately has been a choice for political defeat.