The Superspreader in Chief
Donald Trump's Re-Election Chances Infected by
COVID-19
Donald Trump appeared to be immune to anything that
might ail him – until he failed in the battle against the coronavirus. It could
very well cost him re-election in three weeks.
By Ullrich
Fichtner, Veronika Hackenbroch, René Pfister und Christoph Scheuermann
09.10.2020,
18.43 Uhr
Before
Donald Trump himself became vulnerable, he was more than happy to label entire
countries as "shitholes.” He disparaged Mexicans as rapists and used his
Twitter account to indiscriminately denigrate TV hosts, actors, athletes and
officials with just about any adjective he could muster. He demanded that members
of Congress be removed from their seats, he insulted Senators, he attacked the
justice system, mocked science, parodied people with disabilities and defiled
the memory of fallen soldiers. For the longest time, none of this seemed to
matter much.
Before
Trump’s grip on power began to slip, he aggressively undermined the
Constitutionally protected rights to freedom of the press and freedom of
expression. He called facts into question and missed no opportunity to spread
divisive propaganda. He called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville "good people”
and, during his recent debate with Democratic challenger Joe Biden that was
broadcast to 70 million television viewers, he voiced his apparent support for
the far-right, racist "Proud Boys” movement. He has threatened to jail
critics and opponents, and he has recently focused his attention on reviling
mail-in voting, claiming with no proof whatsoever that it opens the door to
electoral fraud. None of this has hurt him over all these years.
Before the
foundation of Trump's power began to crumble, he separated the children of
migrants on the Mexican border from their parents and had them locked in cages.
He opened up protected areas in the Arctic for oil and gas drilling. He
withdrew from the Paris climate deal and denied there is any such thing as
man-made global warming, even as fires raged for weeks on the West Coast. Until
recently, it seemed like nothing could harm him, like he was immune to
everything.
In the
middle of a global pandemic, the American president cut U.S. funding for the
World Health Organization, he instigated trade conflicts with allies in Europe
and North America and he flirted with dictators in the Middle and Far East. He
drove his country into isolation in NATO and the United Nations. As a
businessman, he pursued tax avoidance to an astonishing extent and accumulated
debts like a con man. And despite all his promises, he never separated his
private business from government affairs.
And yet for
the longest time, none of this has been enough to shake his hopes for
re-election on Nov. 3. It took the past 10 to 14 days for a cascade of events
to finally diminish and perhaps even destroy Trump’s chances of victory.
In these
past two weeks, a lot has happened even by the standards of the recent news
cycles we have seen coming out of the U.S. Two weeks ago, the New York Times
published its revelations about Trump’s tax records, destroying his legend of
being a successful businessman and documenting his dangerous dependence on
financial backers. The first TV debate early last week was so unprofessional,
chaotic and, on Trump’s side, vituperative that it seems almost surprising that
the 74-year-old Trump didn't physically attack the 77-year-old Biden.
Still, the
New York Times revelations and the debate presumably wouldn’t have been a huge
problem for Trump. His voters, after all, have already price in such chicanery.
Nope, what it took was the kind of plot twist that even the best screenwriters
would have blushed at: Trump, who has downplayed the coronavirus pandemic from
the beginning, came down with COVID-19 - as obvious a development as it was
unexpected.
Covincapacitated
It seems
likely that the virus forced its way into the White House around two weeks ago
– and nine days ago, the president of the United States, one of the most
sheltered people in the world, tested positive for the very disease he had been
playing down for months. He had to be hospitalized for several days and he was
treated with a cocktail of strong medications – all because of an illness that
he repeatedly compared to a seasonal flu. The flu,though, wouldn't have had
what it takes to finish Trump off politically. This virus, though, does – even
if he completely recovers. After all, the president badly underestimated his
opponent. And he wasn't immune.
If Trump
fails on election day, and current polls indicate that he will, his management
of the coronavirus pandemic will turn out to have been the decisive factor. If
he fails, it will be because he didn’t take the virus seriously, instead trying
to leverage all the presidential power at his disposal to transform public
health into a partisan issue. Even after catapulting the pandemic to the top of
the national agenda by getting infected with it himself, Trump is still trying
to play the virus down. Since testing positive, America’s First Patient has
performed terribly in dealing with the new situation.
He has
since fallen far behind in polls in the swing states that will determine the
election. In Michigan, Biden has an eight-point lead in the polls. He’s ahead
by seven points in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and by four in Florida. Biden
even stands a chance in Arizona, which has long been firmly in the hands of the
Republicans. It’s remarkable how clearly voters over the age of 65 throughout
the country are turning away from Trump. Four years ago, a majority of them
voted for him.
Of course,
things could still shift in the president’s favor and a lot can still happen
with three weeks left to go before the vote, but Trump’s prospects for
re-election are shrinking.
His
election campaign team just recently scaled back TV ad buys in many states in
the Midwest, another indication that the president sees his chances there
dwindling. Trump’s favorite pollster, Rasmussen, sees him 12 points behind
Biden in national surveys. In the national average of surveys compiled by the
data analysts at FiveThirtyEight, Biden has held at least a six-point lead
since June. On Friday, however, that lead hit 10 points.
Exacerbating
His Worst Traits
The
infection and the fact that his wife and many of his closest staff members also
got sick could have made Trump more reflective and perhaps even a little more
sympathetic. And things did quiet down a bit when Trump first went to the
hospital. But since the weekend, he has been
screaming into the void more than ever. On some days, it has seemed as though
the steroids he has been treated with have produced the side effect of
exacerbating his worst traits.
His return
to the White House from the Walter Reed Military Hospital by helicopter was
carefully staged for primetime, yet another act in the endless spectacle of his
toxic masculinity. But suddenly, his solemn strides, his military salutes, his
thumbs up and raised chin all missed their mark. For many, his return didn't
trigger relief, but dread.
The images,
carefully captured with a phalanx of cameras, were intended to tell a story of
strength. But they didn't. Trump instead seemed like an out-of-place buffoon,
the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, a clown at the center of
power who could be counted on to do anything but manage of the biggest crisis
America has had to face in its recent history. In summoning up all his will to
display his power, it suddenly became clear that he didn't have any.
Unintentionally,
the images revealed that his power is completely divorced from responsibility,
that he has no idea how to wield the power he holds, that he is only ever
looking for his own benefit, even if it is a global pandemic.
Crude
Mistakes
The
mistakes he is now making are crude ones. His act of demonstratively pulling
his mask off while standing on the Truman Balcony was seen as a gesture of
irresponsibility. Trump, after all, was likely still contagious, just as he was
one day earlier when he had his Secret Service detail drive him around in front
of the hospital to ensure he would appear on TV.
He seems
completely indifferent to the fact that he is currently putting all the people
he meets in danger. And that anyone who has anything to do with him should
actually be heading directly into quarantine. Trump seems to believe his own
lies about the harmlessness of the virus. With that attitude, though, he is
going to have trouble getting a majority of Americans to back him. It’s an
attitude that has led to even more mistakes.
Once back
at work, the U.S. president didn’t stop for a second for a bit of calm
reflection about his own situation or that of his country. Instead, he grabbed
for his smartphone and sent a video message to the world, one that millions of
relatives of coronavirus victims were likely to find offensive: "Don’t let
coronavirus control you,” the president said. "Don't be afraid of it."
Trump's
illness has now given even more Americans pause: Perhaps there is, after all, a
need for a change in strategy? How, for example, can you explain the fact that
the U.S. only accounts for 4 percent of the global population, but fully 20
percent of the worldwide deaths from COVID-19? How did the country manage to
reach the exorbitantly high number of 210,000 dead? How does that jibe with
Trump’s mantra that his government has done a "fantastic job” in handling
the coronavirus outbreak? And what if Anthony Fauci, the head of the National
Institute for Infectious Diseases, is right with his warning that there may be
another 190,000 deaths in the country before this is over?
Trump Never
Took Virus Seriously
Even though
he was informed of gravity of the situation very early on, Trump has never
taken the pandemic seriously - and that’s now coming back to haunt him. His
national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, warned as far back as January that
the pandemic would be "the greatest national security threat to his
presidency.” At the time, the U.S. had only a few confirmed infections, so
Trump likely didn’t even think to take the warning seriously. He shifted to
trivializing it, playing it down, denying it, wishful thinking and false hopes.
In
mid-February, Trump said something that he would repeat on many occasions:
"I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in
the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of
virus. So, let’s see what happens, but I think everything is going to work out
fine.”
A few weeks
later, as the number of infections in the U.S. went through the roof, he
announced he would quickly lift existing lockdown measures and reopen the
country entirely by Easter in April. The governors who followed the Trump line
turned their states into pandemic hotspots. Others who refused were verbally
abused by the White House and threatened with cuts in federal funding.
In March,
Trump openly admitted to investigative reporter Bob Woodward that he was well
aware of the dangers of the pandemic and that he had deliberately trivialized
them. "I wanted to always play it down, because I don’t want to create a
panic,” Trump said. Citing legendary British Prime Minister Winston Churchill,
Trump is still trying to sell that today as the responsible approach of a
far-sighted leader. More likely, though, is that Trump was merely worried about
what the disease could do to the economy and how it might affect his prospects
for re-election.
Instead of
doing all he could to contain the virus, as Churchill certainly would have
done, Trump continued to downplay its effects in the hope that more positive
messages would somehow keep the economy afloat. The Washington Post sifted
through Trump’s appearances and statements for remarks that trivialized the
coronavirus and found 138 such statements between January and today. Thins
like: "It’s going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle, it will
disappear."
But that
miracle isn’t going to happen. Instead, a brutal reality is unfolding in the
U.S., one that is partly due to the White House’s failure to implement a
disease-prevention policy. According to one study, tens of thousands of lives
could have been saved in the U.S. if a mask requirement had been introduced on
April 1 for restaurant and retail employees.
Absurd
Consequences
Instead,
Trump continues to mock people who wear masks. Early on in the pandemic, he
once said: "I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that
beautiful Resolute Desk — the great Resolute Desk — I think wearing a face mask
as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know.
Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”
Such
statements set the tone.
The
president continued to set a bad example and defined the attitude that was
expected of hardcore Republicans. Instead of following the advice of his
experts, who had been recommending that masks be worn since April, Trump
managed to turn masks - an effective measure in combatting the pandemic – into
a partisan issue.
The absurd
consequences can be seen today in America: Whereas few people go out into the
streets without a mask, let alone enter a restaurant, in Democratic strongholds
like Washington, D.C., or New York, in Republican America, a hearty handshake
without a mask is considered a sign that a person hasn’t somehow been misled by
the liberal wimps on the East and West Coasts.
Under
Trump’s leadership, the latest COVID hotspot is the White House, which has been
largely abandoned since last week. The majority of the hundreds of employees
who come to the office on normal days are now in quarantine or are working from
home.
After the
second in command of the U.S. Coast Guard tested positive, almost the entire
senior military leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the country’s
top military leader, Mike Milley, had to go into quarantine on Tuesday for safety
reasons. By Thursday, at least 20 people from the inner circle of Donald and
Melania Trump, both of whom have COVID-19, had tested positive for the
coronavirus, including many close advisers to the president. That, too, is
Trump's responsibility.
In the
months since the outbreak of the pandemic, Trump has created an atmosphere in
the White House in which mask wearers are made to look like borderline
traitors, politically correct wusses. Among the few who resisted Trump’s
dictate were Matthew Pottinger, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal
and current security adviser on China issues, and Olivia Troye, who was part of
the coronavirus task force led by Vice President Mike Pence until August, when
she resigned in frustration. "You were looked down upon when you would
walk by with a mask,” Troye told the New York Times.
Meanwhile,
Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader in the Senate who has been
loyal to Trump throughout has now distanced himself from the president on
masking up. "I actually haven’t been to the White House since August the
6th,” he said on Thursday, "because my impression was their approach to
how to handle this was different than mine and what I insisted that we do in
the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing.”
Error-Prone
Tests
In
September, the president once address a reporter with the news agency Reuters
by saying, "If you don't take it off, you're very muffled. So, if you
would take it off, it would be a lot easier.” At the same time, Trump convinced
himself and his people that everything was safe because the White House had a
rigid testing regime.
There was
indeed a lot of testing, but they relied on an error-prone rapid test. And the
only staffers who received daily tests were those who came in direct contact
with the president. In retrospect, the infection control plan concocted by the
White House seems about as sophisticated as something a child would conceive.
It didn’t work. By July, when National Security Adviser O’Brien was infected,
it became clear how far the virus had already advanced into the core of the
government in Washington.
With
liberal Washington residents growing increasingly cautious, the White House was
starting to look more like a clubhouse of corona-deniers in the administration.
Trump Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany gave almost daily press conferences in
which the symbolism could not have been any clearer: In the White House Press
Room, reporters wore face masks and plastic gloves, but at the podium stood a
spokesperson who seldom appeared with a mask. McEnany is now among those
infected.
It is quite
possible that she, like several others apparently, became infected at an event
on Sept. 26, at a time when Trump - initially imperceptibly – began losing
control over his own messaging. On that Saturday, the president proudly
presented jurist Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy
left behind by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Ironically, Trump and his
strategists saw the Rose Garden gathering as a way of finally changing the
subject away from the infuriating pandemic and replacing it with a success
story. But the plan backfired.
The garden
party soon ended up in the headlines for other reasons. Before long, guest
after guest began receiving a positive coronavirus diagnosis. Republican
Senators Mike Lee from Utah and Thom Tillis from North Carolina came down with
COVID-19, as did close White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and former New
Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who had helped Trump prepare for his first
debate.
White House
Rejected Contact Tracing
There is no
incontrovertible proof that they became infected in the Rose Garden, and it is
likely that we'll never know for sure, but photos of the event show guests
embracing and exchanging pecks on the cheek. Nevertheless, when the Centers for
Disease Control (CDC) offered to take over contact tracing for White House
staffers who had become infected, it was rejected. The White House, it seems,
prefers not to know.
What is
clear, however, is that Trump will stop at nothing for a good show, even if it
puts lives at risk. That may sound polemical, but it’s really just an accurate
description of reality. When the president held a campaign rally on June 20 in
a Tulsa, Oklahoma, sports arena, he did so without any apparent considerations
for hygiene or pandemic prevention measures. Thousands of Trump supporters
crammed into the arena as though there was no pandemic at all, even though the
U.S. president has known for months that the potentially deadly virus can be
transmitted through the air.
Indeed,
each of the rallies he has held in recent months was little more than a lunatic
experiment in the heart of a pandemic hotspot - likely with deadly
consequences. In Oklahoma, former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain
was in the audience. Like the vast majority of those present, he was wearing no
mask. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with other Trump fans, Cain wrote on
Twitter: "Having a fantastic time." Nine days later, the 74-year-old
tested positive for the coronavirus, and four weeks after that, he was dead,
having succumbed to complications from the infection. It is impossible to know for
sure if Cain contracted the virus at the Trump event in Tulsa. But it is all
but certain that the infection numbers in the city jumped in part because of
the event – at least according to the city's top health official.
Nevertheless,
Trump showed no indication that he might be willing to forego such large
events. On the contrary, he continued making almost daily appearances before
live audiences, both large and small, right up until last Friday, when he
announced his and Melania's coronavirus infections on Twitter. It was almost as
though he thought the laws of virology didn't apply to him and his supporters.
Criminal
Negligence?
Even the
day before he announced his positive test result, Trump played host at his golf
club in Bedminster to around 200 wealthy donors, who paid several thousand
dollars – even up to $250,000 – to dine and speak with the president and get
their picture taken with him. Doing so, of course, was much more dangerous than
they likely knew, and they certainly would have heard nothing about their
potential for exposure from the White House.
After all,
the president already knew by the time he arrived in Bedminster that Hope
Hicks, a senior Trump adviser, had become infected with the virus, one of the
first positive cases in the president's inner circle. They had been traveling
together in Minnesota that Wednesday when Hicks began showing symptoms. On the
flight back to Washington on Air Force One, Hicks reportedly isolated herself
from the others.
Is the U.S.
president a superspreader? Can one accuse him of criminal negligence for
causing bodily harm? It is almost impossible to comprehend that the White House
has shown zero interest in learning more about the outbreak in the innermost
circle of power – that it isn't even clear when Trump actually came down with
the virus.
All of the
information provided about the world's most famous COVID-19 patient has been
imprecise and contradictory – potentially also edited for political messaging.
When Trump was sent to the hospital, his own chief of staff, Mark Meadows,
described his condition as being much more critical than did his doctor, who
said the president was exhibiting only mild symptoms. In Trump's world, there
is no such thing as reliable information.
Clemens
Wendtner, chief physician at München Klinik Schwabing, a hospital in Munich,
believes that he was "sicker than was officially admitted." It is a
belief that seems confirmed by the list of medications that Trump was given.
The antibody cocktail from the pharmaceutical company Regeneron that was
administered to the president hasn't even been approved yet, with studies
continuing into its efficacy and safety. The fact that his doctors were ready
to prescribe him the medication despite the possible risks involved, and that
he was apparently willing to try it out, would seem to indicate that his
condition was more critical than the White House has been willing to admit.
The second
medication he was prescribed, remdesivir, which inhibits viral replication,
also hints at a more serious infection than has been publicly described. In the
U.S., the intravenously administered drug is only approved for patients who
have been hospitalized. Studies have shown that the drug has been able to speed
up recovery times from 18 days to 12 days among severely ill patients receiving
oxygen. For those with light symptoms, by contrast, the drug has no effect.
Medical
experts are furthermore unsettled by the fact that Trump also received
dexamethasone. "Dexamethasone primarily helps COVID-19 patients who are
seriously ill," says Torsten Feldt, infectiologist and chief physician at
the University Hospital of Dusseldorf. With less serious infections where
supplemental oxygen isn’t necessary, it can even be harmful, he says. The drug
inhibits the body's immune reaction, thus preventing a cytokine storm, the
harmful overreaction of the immune system that is the cause of death for many
COVID-19 patients.
The fact
that Trump received this drug relatively early in the course of the disease and
without having been placed on a respirator led to a fair amount of speculation
among doctors. Did he perhaps contract the disease much earlier than claimed?
Did he secretly receive oxygen? Or was Trump prescribed the medication to make
him feel better so he could get back on the campaign trail more quickly?
One
well-known side-effect of dexamethasone is the - at least temporary –
improvement of the patient's mood and general feeling of well-being. "You
can get almost any patient out of bed for a short time with
dexamethasone," says Wendtner. "We call it the Lazarus effect."
He says he has also heard from his own patients that the drug makes them feel
20 years younger, as Trump himself tweeted from the hospital. "The drug
elevates your self-esteem," Wendtner says. Coming down, though, is more
difficult, he adds.
Trump Has
Badly Miscalculated
But as
uncertain as the true state of Trump's health may be, experts are united in
their verdict concerning the president's catastrophic pandemic response. The
well-respected New England Journal of Medicine even broke with its 208-year
tradition of refraining from political commentary. In the most recent issue,
the journal's editors harshly criticize America's "current political
leaders." Without explicitly naming Trump, they take the kid gloves off,
writing: "Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this
way would be suffering legal consequences."
If he
fails, it will be because he didn’t take the virus seriously enough.
Trump, the
sick man of the White House, has apparently badly miscalculated as his term
comes to an end. His strategy of presenting himself as the virile antithesis of
challenger Joe Biden has disintegrated. Events, after all, have now clearly
proven the propriety of the campaign strategy chosen by Biden, who has largely
campaigned by video from his Delaware home since the beginning of the pandemic
and has only reluctantly taken part in live events.
His was the
rational, proper response to a deadly pandemic. Trump's attempts to paint
Biden's behavior as proof of his weakness have boomeranged. Instead, it is
Trump himself who now looks irresponsible and irrational, while "Sleepy
Joe," in Trump's parlance, looks trustworthy and reliable.
Many of
Trump's histrionic appearances now appear in a different, more malicious light.
The fact that he broke with tradition by using the White House as the backdrop
for his Republican convention propaganda show in August remains unforgotten.
Now, though, it is all the more apparent that he - just as he did during the
announcement of his Supreme Court nomination of Barrett 14 days ago –
unnecessarily put the lives of many people at risk. How can someone serve the
public good when he doesn't even care about the health of those closest to him?
Trump had
plenty of opportunities to prevent this impression and to get a better handle
on the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control has for decades been the gold
standard when it comes to fighting epidemics worldwide, and Anthony Fauci, head
of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, enjoys widespread
respect from both sides of the political spectrum.
Indeed,
Fauci would be a gift to any president finding himself faced with a dangerous
pandemic; his expertise as a virologist is undisputed. Early on in his career,
he developed a therapy for deadly autoimmune diseases, and in the 1980s, he was
one of the leading scientists in the effort to better understand HIV. More than
anything, though, the 79-year-old has the ability to produce simple and useful
explanations for complicated medical issues.
Trump will stop at nothing for a good show, even if it
puts lives at risk.
Early on in
the coronavirus pandemic, Fauci spoke with Trump almost daily, and during his
appearances with the president, his message was the same as that being
communicated by virologists around the world: keep your distance, wash your
hands and limit contact with others. He also warned against the premature
resumption of normal day-to-day activities.
But his
support for even these obvious precautions was enough to get on Trump's bad
side. In April, the president retweeted a post written by a failed Republican
Congressional candidate that included the hashtag #FireFauci. In mid-July, a
memo from the White House Press Office was leaked which described how best to
discredit Fauci in public. It made it look as though the president wasn't
waging war against the virus, but against logic and those who would espouse it.
Breathtaking
Irresponsibility
Trump still
hasn't dared to fire Fauci, likely because he still has enough political
instinct to understand that getting rid of a scientist who has served under six
presidents wouldn't be the best look for him. But his treatment of the expert
virologist has reflected the full breadth of Trump's breathtaking
irresponsibility, his inability to set the right priorities and his jealousy of
anyone and everyone with whom he must share the spotlight. Ever since he
himself has contracted COVID-19, it has become more apparent than ever that the
president is completely lacking in rationality and possesses no compassion
whatsoever. Despite spending his days posting a constant stream of vitriol on
Twitter, he has yet to find any words of comfort for the many people in his
orbit who have become infected - who he, himself, may have infected. Trump
knows only all-caps and exclamation points, but it seems that an increasing
number of people are no longer buying what he is selling.
Perhaps he
has made a few too many empty promises. He can, of course, make the argument
that his Democratic enemies bear responsibility for the fact that his highly
vaunted wall on the border with Mexico was neither paid for by Mexico nor
really completed at all. But the fact that there likely won't be a vaccine
against the coronavirus prior to the election despite Trump's oft-repeated
pledges to the contrary isn’t helping his chances.
Trump's
most recent effort to heap pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to
loosen its standards for approving vaccines came in the middle of this week.
Really, though, nobody but Trump wants to see such a development, not even the
pharmaceutical industry. And the FDA rejected Trump's call and reiterated its
commitment to long-established practices.
In such
situations, Trump seems like the perfect poster boy for what scientists have
dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes the phenomenon of incompetent
people vastly overestimating their abilities due to their own inability to
recognize their incompetence. Trump provided a fantastic example during his
debate with Biden, when he once again claimed that a coronavirus vaccine would
soon be available. When debate moderator Chris Wallace confronted the president
with the fact that CDC Director Robert Redfield didn't agree and believes that
a vaccine will only be widely available in the middle of next year, Trump
responded: "I disagree."
The
consequence of such hubris can be seen in the current pandemic statistics.
There are around 40,000 new coronavirus cases each day in the United States,
with roughly 700 daily COVID-19 deaths. In over 20 states, the trend is moving
in the wrong direction.
Such
numbers are horrific, and even worse for Trump is the fact that his policies
haven't just managed to make the pandemic worse. He has also been unable to get
the economy going again, a rather significant blow to his self-spun legend of
being a business genius. There have been no winners in the Trump presidency,
only losers – and that likely applies to him personally.
Losing
Ground
Even before
his illness and the heavy drugs he has had to take as a result, the president's
Twitter eruptions had long seemed to hint at a somewhat tenuous relationship
with lucidity. Nevertheless, a tweet from this week was especially egregious –
one that temporarily sent the stock market reeling and provoked an immediate
and stinging rebuke from industrial leaders and from his own party. In the
tweet, Trump announced that he was suspending negotiations with the Democrats
over an additional coronavirus aid package worth around $2 trillion. The
precise total was still up for debate, but not the basic necessity of the state
help.
Trump's strategy of presenting himself as the virile
antithesis of challenger Joe Biden has disintegrated.
It was a
major political misstep, one which Trump then sought to correct a few hours
later - again via Twitter. The episode made it look to all the world as though
Trump was no longer in full possession of his faculties. Indeed, his chances
for re-election seem to be shrinking by the day, unless something happens at
the last moment to reverse the trend.
Perhaps the
most unsettling development for the incumbent is that he has been losing ground
in the northern states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and even Ohio,
exactly the states where he won the election four years ago. It isn't even
certain that he will be able to win Georgia, a state that the Democrats last
won fully 28 years ago, back when the candidate was named Bill Clinton.
The first
televised debate was a disaster for Trump, and he has raised the possibility of
declining to participate in a second debate. With the debate commission having
announced its intention to hold the second debate via video link, Trump told
Fox anchor Mario Bartiromo on Thursday morning that he wouldn't "waste my
time on a virtual debate" given that moderators could cut off his
microphone at any time.
He sounded
manic in the interview, expressing displeasure with FBI Director Christopher
Wray and Attorney General William Barr, accusing them of not doing enough to
combat alleged mail-in voting fraud – which Trump has been harping on about for
months, despite there being no evidence that it is a significant problem – and
of not taking action against his political opponents. He finished off the
interview by calling for charges to be filed against Hillary Clinton. It is
almost as though Trump is still stuck in 2016 when he was running against her.
In his
efforts to turn his re-election campaign around, Trump really can’t go any
lower. He has even tried to emulate Brazilian autocrat Jair Bolsonaro, who
tried to use his own experience with contracting and then recovering from
COVID-19 as some kind of proof that fear of the virus was badly exaggerated.
But the numbers in the U.S. disprove this narrative so clearly that Trump's
attempts to sell it look increasingly divorced from reality.
The
majority of Americans have long been of the opinion that their president has
proven to be an inadequate manager of the crisis. The fact that he has now
become infected has only solidified that impression. And the number of his
detractors has recently risen even further: According to a survey conducted by
CNN, two-thirds of people in the U.S. believe that Trump has been irresponsible
in handling the risk of infecting others around him with the coronavirus. Woman
and elderly voters are particularly disappointed in Trump, groups from which he
needs support if he wants to be re-elected.
The
president's poor survey results are hardly surprising. In the past several
months, Trump has acted as though the virus couldn't harm him. His ridicule of
Biden and the mask-wearing Democrats has always been informed by the rather
ridiculous notion that the illness could be held at bay by strength of will.
His own bout with COVID-19 has revealed such nonsense for what it is. And many
Americans also saw the video from Monday showing Trump gasping for breath after
climbing the few steps to the Truman Balcony.
He didn't
look much like a winner. Nor like an American president, for that matter.
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