Emma
Brockes
It has taken the pandemic and wildfires to do it, but
there are signs of a change in the political wind in the US
@emmabrockes
Fri 18 Sep
2020 10.49 BSTLast modified on Fri 18 Sep 2020 18.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/18/trump-supporters-pandemic-wildfires-wind
There was a
brief moment, on Tuesday night, when Donald Trump struck what by his standards
qualified as a moment of sanity. An undecided voter in the audience of a “town
hall” event in Pennsylvania had asked the president why, after mounting a
strong first response to the pandemic, he had subsequently thrown vulnerable
people under the bus by failing to recommend masks or social distancing. In the
course of a long, nonsensical answer, the president said something one rarely
hears him say. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said of the pandemic; and, for a
split second, he sounded almost rational.
That was
it, the sum total of his moment of reason. It didn’t last, obviously. Within
the space of the same answer, Trump promised that a vaccine would be available
within “three weeks, four weeks”, and flogged the same, implausible line that
the US response to the pandemic has been one of the best in the world. By
Wednesday, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had felt
compelled to step forward and clarify that, in all likelihood, it would be well
into 2021 before a vaccine became available, while proffering the opinion that
wearing a mask was as, if not, more important. “I think he made a mistake when
he said that,” retorted Trump. “It’s just incorrect information.”
And so it
goes on, round and round, none of it new. Trump’s unreliability has been on
display from day one – it can hardly be said of the man that he deceived us.
What has changed, clearly, is the world that we live in, one in which multiple
crises put Trump’s shortcomings in a different order of magnitude. On Monday,
Trump visited California to meet the governor, Gavin Newsom, to talk about the
fires raging on the west coast, during which the president was confronted with
the issue of climate science. “I don’t think science knows,” he said. There has
never been a more Trumpian statement.
On a
national level, the result of all this is that Trump poses a very real threat
to the lives of millions of Americans, which in turn poses a personal dilemma.
There’s a received wisdom about politics that it shouldn’t come between you and
your nearest and dearest; that as mature adults, it should be possible to have
a frank exchange of views (if you’re American), or some passive-aggressive
avoidance (if you’re British), and move on. Excommunicating people for holding
opposing political views is the province of bigots and office-holders at the
student union. Besides which, failure to engage is no way to win an argument.
All of this
makes sense, while failing to account for the emotional response many of us
have towards Trump at this point. On Monday, I had a near-conniption while
reading an opinion piece in the Washington Post by a senior fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute, in which she listed the reasons why she was
thinking of voting for Trump. (Broadly, because he acted as a buffer against the
takeover of the Democratic party by “hard-left ideologues” whom she considered
guilty for promoting the line, among others, that “being white is intrinsically
evil”.)
The usual
ludicrous rightwing reasoning, in other words, but it lands differently now. The
word “evil”, such a childish signifier in public discourse, was well chosen; my
own thoughts seized on it as precisely the right word to describe the author of
the piece. It is almost impossible, in this climate, to consider giving Trump
sympathisers a free pass, or to understand their allegiance to him as anything
other than personal interest at the expense of public good. Earlier this month,
nine pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and AstraZeneca, felt obliged
to issue a joint statement saying they would “stand with science”, in implied
opposition to the president’s disregard for public safety in pushing for a
vaccine. When even the drug companies find a conscience (albeit one that
defends their integrity as a mechanism to protect future sales) you have to
wonder at the people who persist in backing the president.
For a lot
of Americans, the stakes of Trump’s presidency have always been this high. It
has taken a pandemic and the burning of large parts of the country to bring
everyone else up to speed. Now that we’re here, however, it seems to me almost
impossible to engage with the other side. I think of the few people I know –
older relatives of friends – who sympathise with Trump, and the dislike I feel
towards them is so intense, so visceral, so childish in its desire to scream in
their direction, that I practically have to sit on my hands.
Thanksgiving
falls after the election in November, and it’s probably the one good thing
about the pandemic that most Americans won’t be travelling long distances to
celebrate, sparing themselves a family falling-out over politics, and perhaps
providing us with a moment to remember that if you don’t scream at people, they
can still change their minds. After the town hall in Philadelphia, the floating
voter who asked Trump about masks was asked what he thought of the president’s
answer. The man had voted for Trump in 2016 and described himself as a pro-life
conservative. “He didn’t answer anything,” he said. “He was lying through his
teeth.”
• Emma
Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York
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