President
Donald Trump
Much of the steady decline in President Donald
Trump's polling can be attributed to his handling of the coronavirus — recent
surveys show about two-thirds of Americans disapprove of his efforts. | Drew
Angerer/Getty Images
‘Make America Normal Again’: Trump backers plead
for a virus plan
Political allies say outlining a more specific plan to
battle the coronavirus might be the most important factor for Trump's
reelection.
By ANITA
KUMAR
07/24/2020
07:45 PM EDT
President
Donald Trump restarted the White House coronavirus briefings. He urged
Americans to wear masks. He even scrapped his party’s convention.
To many of
his own allies, it’s still not enough.
Trump’s
political allies, alarmed by his sinking poll numbers, are warning that the
president’s best chance to get reelected is to outline more detailed plans to
conquer the coronavirus he keeps trying to wish away. They are advising him to
offer people something concrete they can look to as the pandemic surges in
dozens of states, eroding months of progress.
“The
message has to be about the path forward,” said former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, a Trump ally.
For weeks,
Trump had been doing anything but that. He demonized protesters. He crowed
about mail-in voting fraud. He bragged — more than once — about the results of
a cognitive test.
Then this
week, Trump made more public attempts to change his focus. He spoke of plans to
protect nursing home residents. He discussed an agreement to purchase potential
coronavirus vaccines. He backed away from strident demands for the next
economic relief package being hashed out on Capitol Hill.
Yet the
president continued to offer contradictory messages, pushing again for schools
to open in the fall, despite the concerns of public health officials. And he
didn’t outline any specific plans for addressing complaints about the long wait
for test results and the lack of contact tracing, one major key to curbing the
spread of the disease. And he claimed that his administration had filled all
its requests from states for supplies, though governors dispute that.
Scott
Jennings, who worked for President George W. Bush and is close to the Trump
White House, said partly in jest that Trump needs to change his motto from
“Make America Great Again” to “Make America Normal Again.”
“He needs
to talk about the future,” Jennings said. “He needs to give people the plan
that will return us to normalcy.”
With just
100 days before the election, as the pandemic kills 1,000 Americans a day,
Trump is lagging behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in most national
polls and battleground states. His standing has even fallen in traditionally
red states, including Arizona and Georgia.
Much of the
steady decline can be attributed to his handling of the coronavirus — recent
surveys show about two-thirds of Americans disapprove of his efforts. In
Florida, a state reeling from a coronavirus surge, a new poll shows Biden with
a 13-point lead over Trump.
At the
start of 2020, Republicans were increasingly confident Trump could win
reelection on the back of historic low unemployment and a positive economic
outlook. But after the pandemic hit and the economy tanked, they fear Trump
might not win unless he can get the country out from underneath the virus and
focus on Biden.
“Trump
against Trump will guarantee a loss,” said an outside Trump adviser. “Trump
against Biden will win.”
Biden — who
has largely remained at his Delaware home conducting online events — has tried
to make the race a referendum on Trump’s response to the coronavirus, which has
overtaken American life, shuttering business and schools and forcing millions
of people into their homes.
“It didn’t
have to be this bad,” Biden said in a statement Thursday when the U.S. passed 4
million cases. “Instead of the wartime president we were promised, America is
led by someone even his own aides and allies describe as ‘bored’ and
‘distracted’ by the fight against this virus.”
Biden’s
allies have picked up on the theme. Just this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
started calling the disease “the Trump virus.”
Trump, who
continues to heap praise on his administration for its “tremendous job”
handling the virus, told reporters that he knows he will be judged in November
on his response to the pandemic but insisted voters will also consider other
accomplishments, which he listed as growing the economy and increasing military
funding.
Trump tried
to change his own pandemic narrative this week. In three successive evening
news conferences, Trump mostly kept to his notes, used a more somber tone — by
his standards, that is — and quickly sped through questions before departing.
It was a marked difference from the rambling briefings Trump held this spring,
where he held court daily, sometimes for more than two hours, offering
erroneous health claims, misrepresenting his administration’s work on the
pandemic and pontificating on any subject that happened to cross his mind.
The
president is also refocusing his upcoming travel on the pandemic, traveling to
North Carolina next week to visit a company involved in a potential vaccine.
"You’re
seeing an evolution of a realization of the reality of what's going on and I
believe he's adjusting to that right now and acting accordingly,” said Anthony
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
during a Fox News interview on Friday. “So you know, I'm very, in many
respects, positively responding to that because that’ll set a good example for
the rest of the country."
Still,
Trump reiterated his claim the coronavirus will eventually disappear and
indicated he was still developing a recovery strategy six months after the
first Covid-19 case was detected in the U.S.
“We are in
the process of developing a strategy that's going to be very, very powerful,”
he told reporters Tuesday.
“The fact
that he can’t or won't talk about it is a symptom of the problem and not the
underlying problem that he has no plan to deal with the underlying health
crisis,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist and frequent Trump critic
who worked for 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush. “Hope is not a strategy.”
And Trump
did veer off topic as the week went on — claiming without evidence that the
nationwide protests had contributed to the surge in cases and that the border
wall with Mexico had helped prevent an even greater surge. He also continued
his typical Twitter commentary about everything from the criminal charges
against a MAGA celebrity, to Michael Flynn, to the ways Biden will destroy
neighborhoods for “suburban housewives.”
A former
White House official said Trump has a strong political sense of what he should
talk about, which helped him win the presidency in 2016 when few thought he
would.
“He’s
always trusted his gut and his gut has always gotten him further than what anyone
else thinks,” the former official said.
But the
former official acknowledged that Americans right now may be looking for
something else and that Trump should focus on a coronavirus plan. “People want
assurances that there’s a path forward,” the former official said.
Trump has
been trying to resume his own schedule since early June with limited success.
He held large rallies in Oklahoma and Arizona, but faced diminished crowds and
allegations that he was contributing to the virus spreading. At those rallies,
Trump acted almost as if the coronavirus didn’t exist. Instead, he covered his
greatest hits: his nomination of conservative judges, his funding increase for
the military, his border wall and, of course, his grievances of the moment.
In Tulsa,
Okla., he spent less than four minutes of his one hour, 45-minute speech on the
coronavirus. But he spent more than 14 minutes mockingly recounting the
attention he got when he used two hands to drink a glass of water, before
slowly descending a ramp during the commencement ceremony at the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point.
“We can
debate about how to talk about it, but certainly he needs to talk about it,”
Jennings said. “When you ignore it, people are like, 'Why are you ignoring
it?’”
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