Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone?
He’s
not rising to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic. He’s shriveling into
nothingness.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
April 6, 2020
Do you remember President George W.
Bush’s remarks at Ground Zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks? I can still hear him speaking of national grief and national pride.
This was before all the awful judgment calls and fatal mistakes, and it doesn’t
excuse them. But it mattered, because it reassured us that our country’s leader
was navigating some of the same emotional currents that we were.
Do you remember President Barack Obama’s
news conference after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 28
people, including 20 children, dead? I do. Freshest in my memory is how
he fought back tears. He was hurting. He cared. And while
we couldn’t bank on new laws to prevent the next massacre, we could at least
hold on to that.
One
more question: Do you remember the moment when President Trump’s bearing and
words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly
metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it?
It passed me by, maybe because it never
happened.
In
Trump’s predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a
heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can’t, and that fills me with a
sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don’t know what to do with.
Americans are dying by the thousands,
and he gloats about what a huge, rapt television audience he has. They’re
confronting financial ruin and not sure how they’ll continue to pay for food
and shelter, and he reprimands governors for not treating him with adequate
adulation.
He’s not rising to the challenge before
him, not even a millimeter. He’s shriveling into nothingness.
On Friday, when Trump relayed a new
recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all
Americans wear face masks in public places, he went so far out of his way to
stress that the coverings were voluntary and that he himself wouldn’t be going
anywhere near one that he might as well have branded them Apparel for Skittish
Losers. I’ve finally settled on his epitaph: “Donald J. Trump, too cool for the
coronavirus.”
This
is more than a failure of empathy, which is how many observers have described
his deficiency. It’s more than a failure of decency, which has been my go-to
lament. It’s a failure of basic humanity.
In The Washington Post a few days ago,
Michael Gerson, a conservative who worked in Bush’s White House, wrote that Trump’s spirit is
“a vast, trackless wasteland.” Not exactly trackless. There are gaudy outposts
of ego all along the horizon.
When the direness of this global health
crisis began to be apparent, I was braced for the falsehoods and misinformation
that are Trump’s trademarks. I was girded for the incompetence that defines an
administration with such contempt for proper procedure and for true expertise.
But what has taken me by surprise and
torn me up inside are the aloofness, arrogance, pettiness, meanness, narcissism
and solipsism that persist in Trump — that flourish in him — even during
a once-in-a-lifetime emergency that demands something nobler. Under normal
circumstances, these traits are galling. Under the current ones, they’re
gutting.
“I don’t take responsibility at
all.” “Did you know I was number one on Facebook?” To bother with
just one of those sentences while a nation trembles is disgusting. To bother
with both, as Trump did, is perverse.
He continues to bash the media, as if
the virus were cooked up in the bowels of CNN. He continues to play blame games
and to lord his station over those of a lesser political caste, turning governors into grovelers and suggesting that
they’re whiny piggies at the federal trough.
He
continues his one-man orgy of self-congratulation, so that in the same breath
recently he speculated about a toll of 100,000 deaths in America from Covid-19
and crowed about what a great job he’s doing.
And he continues to taunt and smear his
perceived political adversaries. Last week, on Fox News, he called Nancy Pelosi
“a sick puppy.” This is how he chooses to spend his time and energy?
At those beloved daily briefings of
his, where he talks and talks and talks, he sometimes seems to regard what’s
happening less as a devastating scourge than as a star-studded event. Just look
at the nifty degree of prominence it’s conferring on everyone and everything
involved! He has mused aloud about how well known Anthony Fauci has become. He
has marveled at the disease’s celebrity profile.
“Become a very famous term —
C-O-V-I-D,” he said on Thursday. Was that envy in his voice?
He leaps from tone deafness to some
realm of complete sensory and moral deprivation.
“I want to come way under the
models,” he said on
Friday, referring to casualty projections. “The professionals did the models. I
was never involved in a model.”
“At least this kind of model,” he
added. No context like a pandemic for X-rated humor.
It’s an extraordinary thing: to fill
the air with so many words and have none of them carry any genuine sadness or
stirring resolve.
I can hear his admirers grumble that he
doesn’t do camera-perfect emotions, that Obama was just a better actor, that
Trump is the more authentic man.
To
which I answer: What’s the point of having a showman for a president if he
can’t put on the right kind of show? Performances count, even if they’re just
performances. And Trump clearly isn’t averse to artifice. Just look at his
hair.
A cheap shot? I’m feeling cheap. A loss
of life and livelihoods on this scale will do that to you.
As of this writing, at least 9,600
people with the coronavirus have died in the United States. That’s more than
three times the number killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. New York State alone
reported 630 new deaths on
Saturday . No school shooting has taken even a small faction of as many lives.
And while I’m not looking to Trump for
any panacea, is it too much to ask for some sign that the dying has made an
impression on him, that the crying has penetrated his carapace and that he’s
thinking about something other than his ratings? I watch. I wait. I suspect
I’ll be doing that forever.