Has Trump Reached the
Lying-to-Himself-and-Believing-It Stage of the Coronavirus Pandemic?
The reality—in both
public-health and crass political terms—doesn’t look good for the President.
May 8, 2020
On
Tuesday afternoon, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, came on the line
with a breaking-news bulletin. Just before our interview, Whitmer had heard
that President Trump was talking about
dismantling the coronavirus task force he had assembled to oversee the national
response to the pandemic. Whitmer seemed stunned by this
information—U.S. infections from covid-19
were well over a million, the daily national death toll was often more than two
thousand, and, in Whitmer’s hard-hit state, the crisis had already claimed more
than four thousand of her constituents’ lives. “It’s just shocking,” she said,
as we both tried to absorb the news. “Something new happens every day.”
By
the next morning, Trump had, once again, changed his mind. He told reporters
that he had no idea how “popular” the coronavirus task force was, and that it
would remain in operation while shifting its emphasis toward reopening the
economy and away from a public-health catastrophe that has already caused more
U.S. deaths than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. These are
crazy times in American politics. What’s a governor, or anyone trying to make
sense of Trump’s on-again, off-again war on the virus, supposed to say?
Whitmer,
a first-term Democrat in a swing state that helped Trump win the Presidency in
2016, has become such a lightning rod for Trump and his supporters that the
President has given Whitmer her own derogatory Twitter nickname. After
long-gun-toting protesters opposing her stay-at-home order entered the Michigan
capitol last week—some of them wearing Trump campaign regalia, and some
carrying Confederate flags, nooses, and swastikas—the President praised them as
“very good people.” As Democrats nationally celebrate Whitmer’s unyielding response,
and as Joe Biden considers her as his running
mate, both the Republican-controlled state legislature and a Republican member
of Congress have now sued her for using her emergency powers to keep the state
closed during the crisis. Meanwhile, in heavily Democratic, heavily
African-American Detroit, health-care workers are struggling to contain one of the worst
outbreaks in the country.
Public
polls show that the vast majority of Michiganders support social-distancing
measures to combat the pandemic (as is true nationwide), and also Whitmer’s
handling of the situation. In a state that Trump needs to win this fall, his
approval ratings have dropped, while Whitmer’s have risen. Whitmer told me that
Trump’s hyper-partisan approach did not make sense in terms of either public
health or crass politics. “The enemy is a virus, and it doesn’t care what party
you’re in, it doesn’t care what state you’re in,” she said. Trump, however, has
not only persisted in his critiques of “that woman from Michigan” but
nationalized his combative approach, with one policy for “Democrat states,” as
he recently called them, that are the worst-affected by the virus, and another
for Republican ones.
A
fleeting image, captured on C-span inside
the U.S. Capitol this week, highlighted the divisive absurdity of the
moment: Mitt Romney, wearing a mask, walked out of the
Senate Republican Conference weekly lunch meeting toting a large placard with a
graph on it. “Blue states aren’t the only ones who are screwed,” read the
headline on the placard. Romney, though, is a minority of one. The lone
Republican in either the House or Senate to support convicting Trump in his recent
impeachment trial, Romney, who was the Republican Presidential nominee in 2012,
is now an outlier in a Party with a devotion to Trump so strong that it has not
faltered even in the face of the President’s reality-defying response to the
pandemic.
Romney’s
pitch, in fact, appeared to be so unpersuasive that, by Wednesday evening,
Politico reported that “Senate
Republicans are settling on their pandemic message as they fight to save their
majority: President Donald Trump did a tremendous job.” This, not at all
coincidentally, is the theme of a new ad being run nationwide by the Trump
campaign, in which the President is portrayed as a heroic leader who defied
Democrats and media pundits, shut off the country from the Chinese virus, and will lead America’s
cratering economy to recovery. In case the message is too subtle, the ad spells
it out in big all-capital letters on the screen: “the greatest comeback story.”
When
I went to college, we used to joke during exam period that you were really in
trouble when you started to lie to yourself and believe it. The President and
at least some of his most fervent supporters appear now to be in the
lying-to-yourself-and-believing-it stage of the pandemic. Truth has become so
inconvenient that it’s better left aside for some alternate, less inconvenient
reality. This is, of course, not the first time in the Trump Presidency, or
even the first time during this pandemic, that there has been such a gap, but
it appears to be a moment when there is a widening and very likely
unsustainable gulf between Trumpian truth and what is actually happening.
That’s
because the numbers are the numbers and, for Trump and for America, they look terrible.
On Wednesday, there were some twenty-six hundred deaths in the United States
from covid-19, and, on
Thursday, there were even more: around twenty-seven hundred. Leaked predictions
from government scientists show an increase, by
June 1st, to three thousand deaths, on average, every twenty-four hours. As
Whitmer noted to me, that amounts to essentially a 9/11’s worth of victims per
day. Even after some seventy-five thousand deaths and a couple months of
social-distancing public-health measures, the charts demonstrate clearly that
the national curve has not flattened, with sharp declines registered only in
New York and New Jersey—which have already gone through the country’s worst
ordeal—and a handful of other states. More than half the states have at least
partially lifted strict stay-at-home orders, although none of the states that
announced reopenings—not one—met the criteria established by the Trump Administration
for doing so. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week, a
detailed, seventeen-page guide for how to return safely to workplaces and
schools was quashed by the White House, and its authors were told it would
“never see the light of day,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday.
Testing capability is nowhere near the millions of additional tests needed to
resume regular daily life, according to experts, nor is there widespread
capacity to conduct contact tracing, another prerequisite.
Yet
many states are reopening anyway, and Trump is not, at least for now, even
bothering to hide the fact that more Americans may die as a result of these
decisions. On Tuesday, he flew to a mask factory in Arizona for a photo op,
where he appeared not wearing a mask, as the Guns N’ Roses version of the song
“Live and Let Die” blasted over the factory’s loudspeakers. In an interview
taped at the factory, Trump said, “I’m viewing our great citizens of this
country to a certain extent, and to a large extent, as warriors. They’re
warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country. Will
some people be badly affected? Yes.” On Wednesday, he elaborated as to what he
meant by “badly affected.” Asked if more Americans might die as a result of
reopening too soon, he said, “Hopefully that won’t be the case.” But, he added,
“It could very well be the case.” He also argued against more testing. “In a
way, by doing all this testing, we make ourselves look bad,” he said. On
Thursday, it was reported that, even as Trump was saying this, one of his
personal valets, who delivers his meals, had tested positive for the virus. In
response, Trump said he would now be tested every day. Reality, it turns out,
is not just a matter of political optics.
In the past, when Trump
has got too far away from what is actually happening and into his personal hall
of mirrors, the press of events has forced him to abandon his position. He is
adept enough at self-survival to make wild course corrections where necessary.
This is a man, after all, who said in late February that coronavirus cases
would soon be down to zero and, just two weeks later, declared a national
emergency and vowed to wage war on the deadly “invisible enemy.” I’ve seen many
possible explanations for Trump’s bizarre, reality-defying behavior in recent
days. He’s bored. He’s clueless. He’s panicking about his reëlection. He
doesn’t care about anything other than the stock market. He’d rather talk about
his border wall or vanquishing the “deep state.” All of them might be correct.
It’s also possible that Trump really is the greatest of all time at something:
believing his own hype. On Sunday, he stared right into a Fox News camera and
declared that he had been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln—while speaking at
the national memorial to the slain President. Either Trump is the most brazen
politician in the long line of brazen American politicians or he somehow had
been brainwashed by his own B.S.
Still,
Trump appears to me to be increasingly terrified at the very real prospect of
losing in November, as both national polls and surveys in battleground states
currently show him doing. Overnight Monday and again on Tuesday, he let loose
about an ad being run against him by a group of Never Trump Republicans called
the Lincoln Project. The ad, “Mourning in America,” shows haunting scenes of a
devastated country, “weaker and sicker and poorer” after four years under
Trump’s leadership. The President responded by calling the group “the losers
project” and railing about its founders, among them George Conway, the
Trump-bashing husband of the White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway. This did
not exactly seem like a confident performance by the most powerful man on the
planet. It seemed like the scared rant of someone who knows that, eventually,
he might finally be called on his most bullshit of performances.
Even
Corey Lewandowski—Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and as blustery a loyalist to
the President as exists—is now publicly acknowledging that Trump has set an
extraordinarily risky political course in declaring victory over a still-raging
pandemic. “It’s a huge gamble,” Lewandowski said in an interview, released on
Thursday, with Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody. He added, “If
there is a resurgence . . . not just in the next four weeks or
six weeks, but as the weather turns again, if, come the fall in September, in
October, we see an uptick again in the covid-19
pandemic coming back because we didn’t handle it right the first time—we still
don’t have testing and we don’t have a solution—that is devastating as an
incumbent President of the United States.”
More
than three decades ago, in his as-told-to memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump
bragged about the sheer, addictive effectiveness of lying—he called it
“hyperbole”—in service of his goals. Yet he also acknowledged, “You can’t con
people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful
promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole.
But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.” On
November 3rd, we’ll find out if they did. For now, the scary prospect is sure
to keep Trump up for many more nights to come, hate-tweeting in the dark.
