The
President Is Trapped
Trump is utterly unsuited to deal with this crisis, either
intellectually or temperamentally.
MARCH 25, 2020
Contributing writer at The
Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / GETTY
For his entire adult life, and
for his entire presidency, Donald Trump has created his own alternate reality,
complete with his own alternate set of facts. He has shown himself to be
erratic, impulsive, narcissistic, vindictive, cruel, mendacious, and devoid of
empathy. None of that is new.
But we’re
now entering the most dangerous phase of the Trump presidency. The pain and
hardship that the United States is only beginning to experience stem from a
crisis that the president is utterly unsuited to deal with, either
intellectually or temperamentally. When things were going relatively well, the
nation could more easily absorb the costs of Trump’s psychological and moral
distortions and disfigurements. But those days are behind us. The coronavirus
pandemic has created the conditions that can catalyze a destructive set of
responses from an individual with Trump’s characterological defects and
disordered personality.
We are
now in the early phase of a medical and economic tempest unmatched in most of
our lifetimes. There’s too much information we don’t have. We don’t know the
full severity of the pandemic, or whether a state like New York is a harbinger
or an outlier. But we have enough information to know this virus is rapidly
transmissible and lethal.
The qualities we most need
in a president during this crisis are calmness, wisdom, and reassurance; a
command of the facts and the ability to communicate them well; and the capacity
to think about the medium and long term while carefully weighing competing
options and conflicting needs. We need a leader who can persuade the public to
act in ways that are difficult but necessary, who can focus like a laser beam
on a problem for a sustained period of time, and who will listen to—and, when
necessary, defer to—experts who know far more than he does. We need a president
who can draw the nation together rather than drive it apart, who excels at the
intricate work of governing, and who works well with elected officials at every
level. We need a chief executive whose judgment is not just sound, but
exceptional.
We are
now in the early phase of a medical and economic tempest unmatched in most of
our lifetimes. There’s too much information we don’t have. We don’t know the
full severity of the pandemic, or whether a state like New York is a harbinger
or an outlier. But we have enough information to know this virus is rapidly
transmissible and lethal.
The qualities we most need
in a president during this crisis are calmness, wisdom, and reassurance; a
command of the facts and the ability to communicate them well; and the capacity
to think about the medium and long term while carefully weighing competing
options and conflicting needs. We need a leader who can persuade the public to
act in ways that are difficult but necessary, who can focus like a laser beam
on a problem for a sustained period of time, and who will listen to—and, when
necessary, defer to—experts who know far more than he does. We need a president
who can draw the nation together rather than drive it apart, who excels at the
intricate work of governing, and who works well with elected officials at every
level. We need a chief executive whose judgment is not just sound, but
exceptional.
There are some 325 million
people in America, and it’s hard to think of more than a handful who are more
lacking in these qualities than Donald Trump.
But we need to consider
something else, which is that the coronavirus pandemic may lead to a rapid and
even more worrisome psychological and emotional deterioration in the commander
in chief. This is not a certainty, but it’s a possibility we need to be
prepared for.
Here’s how this might play
out; to some extent, it already has.
Let’s start with what we
know. Someone with Trump’s psychological makeup, when faced with facts and
events that are unpleasant, that he perceives as a threat to his self-image and
public standing, simply denies them. We saw that repeatedly during the early
part of the pandemic, when the president was giving false reassurance and spreading false information one
day after another.
After a few days in which
he was willing to acknowledge the scope and scale of this crisis—he declared
himself a “wartime
president”—he has now regressed to type, once again becoming a fountain of
misinformation. At a press conference yesterday, he declared that he “would
love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter,” which is
less than three weeks away, a goal that top epidemiologists and health
professionals believe would be catastrophic.
“I think it’s possible. Why
not?” he said
with a shrug during a town hall hosted by Fox News later in the day. (Why
Easter? He explained, “I just
thought it was a beautiful time, a beautiful timeline.”) He said this as New
York City’s case count is doubling
every three days and the U.S. case count is now setting
the pace for the world.
As one person who consults
with the Trump White House on the coronavirus response put it to me, “He has
chosen to imagine the worst is behind us when the worst is clearly ahead of
us.”
After listening to the president’s
nearly-two-hour briefing on Monday—in which, among other things, Trump declared, “If it
were up to the doctors, they may say … ‘Let’s shut down the entire world.’ …
This could create a much bigger problem than the problem that you start off
with”—a former White House adviser who has worked on past pandemics told me,
“This fool will bring the death of thousands needlessly. We have mobilized as a
country to shut things down for a time, despite the difficulty. We can work our
way back to a semblance of normality if we hold out and let the health system
make it through the worst of it.” He added, “But now our own president is undoing
all that work and preaching recklessness. Rather than lead us in taking on a
difficult challenge, he is dragging us toward failure and suffering. Beyond
belief.”
Yes and no. The thing to understand about Donald Trump is
that putting others before self is not something he can do, even temporarily.
His attempts to convey facts that don’t serve his perceived self-interest or to
express empathy are forced, scripted, and always short-lived, since such
reactions are alien to him.
This president does not
have the capacity to listen to, synthesize, and internalize information that
does not immediately serve his greatest needs: praise, fealty, adoration. “He
finds it intolerable when those things are missing,” a clinical psychologist
told me. “Praise, applause, and accolades seem to calm him and boost his
confidence. There’s no room for that now, and so he’s growing irritable and
needing to create some way to get some positive attention.”
She added that the pandemic
and its economic fallout “overwhelm Trump’s capacity to understand, are outside
of his ability to internalize and process, and [are] beyond his frustration
tolerance. He is neither curious nor interested; facts are tossed aside when
inconvenient or [when they] contradict his parallel reality, and people are
disposable unless they serve him in some way.”
It’s useful here to recall that Trump’s success as a
politician has been built on his ability to impose his will and narrative on
others, to use his experience on a reality-television show and his skill as a
con man to shape public impressions in his favor, even—or perhaps,
especially—if those impressions are at odds with reality. He convinced a good
chunk of the country that he is a wildly successful businessman and knows
more about campaign finance, the Islamic State, the courts, the visa
system, trade, taxes, the debt, renewable energy, infrastructure, borders, and
drones than anyone else.
But in this instance, Trump
isn’t facing a political problem he can easily spin his way out of. He’s facing
a lethal virus. It doesn’t give a damn what Donald Trump thinks of it or tweets
about it. Spin and lies about COVID-19, including that it will soon magically
disappear, as Trump claimed it
would, don’t work. In fact, they have the opposite effect. Misinformation will
cause the virus to increase its deadly spread.
So as the crisis deepens—as
the body count increases, hospitals are overwhelmed, and the economy contracts,
perhaps dramatically—it’s reasonable to assume that the president will reach
for the tools he has used throughout his life: duplicity and denial. He will
not allow facts that are at odds with his narrative to pierce his magnetic
field of deception.
But what happens to Trump
psychologically and emotionally when things don’t turn around
in the time period he wants? What happens if the tricks that have allowed him
to walk away from scandal after scandal don’t work quite so well, if the doors
of escape are bolted shut, and if it dawns on even some of his
supporters—people who will watch family members, friends, and neighbors
contract the disease, some number of whom will die—that no matter what Trump
says, he can’t alter this epidemiological reality?
All of this would likely
enrage him, and feed his paranoia.
As the health-care and
economic crises worsen, Trump’s hallmarks will be even more fully on display.
The president will create new scapegoats. He’ll blame governors for whatever
bad news befalls their states. He’ll berate reporters who ask questions that
portray him in a less-than-favorable light. He’ll demand even more cultlike
coverage from outlets such as Fox News. Because he doesn’t tolerate
relationships that are characterized by disagreement or absence of obeisance,
before long we’ll see key people removed or silenced when they try to counter a
Trump-centered narrative. He’ll try to find shiny objects to divert our
attention from his failures.
All of these things are
from a playbook the president has used a thousand times. Perhaps they’ll
succeed again. But there’s something distinct about this moment, compared with
every other moment in the Trump presidency, that could prove to be utterly
disorienting and unsettling for the president. Hush-money payments won’t make
COVID-19 go away. He cannot distract people from the global pandemic. He can’t
wait it out until the next news cycle, because the next news cycle will also be
about the pandemic. He can’t easily create another narrative, because he is
often sharing the stage with scientists who will not lie on his behalf.
The president will try to
blame someone else—but in this case the “someone else” is a virus, not a
Mexican immigrant or a reporter with a
disability, not a Muslim or a Clinton, not a dead war
hero or a family of
a fallen soldier, not a special counsel or an NFL player who kneels for the
national anthem. He will try to use this crisis to pit one party against the
other—but the virus will kill both Republicans and Democrats. He will try to
create an alternate story to distract people from an inconvenient truth—but in
this case, the public is too afraid, the story is too big, and the carnage will
be too great to be distracted from it.
America will make it to the
other side of this crisis, as it has after every other crisis. But the struggle
will be a good deal harder, and the human cost a good deal higher, because we
elected as president a man who is so damaged and so broken in so many ways.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to
the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
PETER WEHNER is
a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a
senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Egan visiting professor
at Duke University. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and
national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death
of Politics: How to
Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.
