In Pursuit of Normalcy: Donald Trump and the Coronavirus
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
If the latest warnings from the World Health Organization are borne out, the United States appears to be heading rapidly towards becoming one of the epicentres of Coronavirus Covid-19 in the western world with a significantly growing rate of infection. The latest figures from the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the States puts the total confirmed cases at 33,404, with deaths sadly reaching 400. Particularly worrying, current models identify the city of New York as especially vulnerable, behind the Italian region of Lombardy or the Spanish city of Madrid and placing it on a steeper mortality trajectory than Wuhan in China.
Politics, much like ourselves, is not immune from infection and much time on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue over the past number of weeks has been spent on figuring out how to respond to the global pandemic. This is the first major test of the Trump presidency. But, if the past four years has taught us anything it is that Donald Trump tends to prefer the irregular to the conventional response. Even in these particularly abnormal times, Trump has managed to keep to his script and pursued his particular Trumpian brand of irregularity … what we might identify in this strange political era as the Trumpian normal.
Trump’s Political Response
The political response to the crisis has not been marked by the same clarity and decisiveness as in most European countries. What has emerged is a piecemeal approach, with governors and mayors taking the lead. For example, the mayors of New York City and Los Angeles have effectively locked down their cities and governors in Massachusetts, Ohio and California has imposed similar ‘lockdown’ restrictions in their states.
At the federal level, President Trump has moved gingerly – and with more than a fair share of equivocation – towards accepting the severity of the public health emergency. In late January, when the first cases emerged, the president said the virus was not a problem, it was “going to be just fine,” he claimed. “It’s just one person coming in from China.” By late February, at a campaign rally, Trump labelled the then epidemic a hoax dreamed up by the Democrats and the ‘Fake News Media’ after their combined failure to impeach him in order to make him look bad. In the past three weeks, as serious concerns arose around the rapid spread of the virus across the country, accompanied by the failure and seeming inability to undertake the necessary levels of testing and the limited response to addressing the need for medical equipment such as ventilators and protective gear, Trump’s response has altered – but only slightly. After all, he has given himself a 10/10 for his response, said he would not call previous presidents to seek their counsel and bluntly has refused to take any responsibility at all.
Yet, we now know, from reporting last Friday in The Washington Post, that at the very same time as he dismissed the potential problems with Coronavirus, Trump ignored the repeated warnings from his intelligence community throughout January and February. Such neglect by the administration is even more sobering when read alongside the code-named Crimson Contagion imagined influenza pandemic tests conducted by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services between January and August last year. The draft report, seen for the first time last week by the New York Times, “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.” In one such model tested – where there was widespread confusion around who was in charge – the report authors concluded that the federal agencies would attempt to jockey for position, state officials and hospitals would struggle with medical resourcing and cities and states would make unilateral decisions around school closures and other public protection measures. Both the imagined influenza and the resulting response model have been realised and are now the reality that Americans face.
Read More: Timeline of How Donald Trump Responded to Coronavirus
To this end, Trump’s political response has been normal – at least for the Trump administration. Perhaps we should refer to it as ‘Trumpian normal’? It has been characterised by what we have come expect: bombast and self-laudation combined with misinformation, followed by clarification and correction from administration officials. Added to this, we have disorganisation at a federal response level, mixed messaging, along with the now ritual attacks of opponents and the media online and at press gatherings. While the circumstances are different, Trump’s response has been akin to his many self-made crises and the rare occasions events have caught up with him that demanded a response. Think of Puerto Rico a couple of years ago after Hurricane Maria.
Trump’s Rhetorical Response
A marker of how little Covid-19 has altered President Trump’s approach to politics is the rhetoric he has used.
He has – much like other political leaders around the world, in particular Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron – taken the rhetorical posture of a wartime president, replacing attacking and progressing armies with the pandemic as the nation’s chief enemy. Yet, Trump – in his usual fashion – has been more explicit about this framing. On Wednesday last week he spoke about the spread of the virus as “our big war,” calling it specifically a “medical war,” before defining himself as “a wartime President.” Such framing carries, on the one hand, political expediency for the president. Conventionally, it should allow him to always be on the offensive, attacking the virus as the enemy; a particularly useful tool of deflection when he faces such level of criticism of his handling of the crisis. Plus, as Douglas Brinkley rightly pointed out, in terms of political expediency, being identified as a wartime president in an election year is much better than being painted as a leader during an economic recession.
On the other hand, it provides a rhetorical tool of coalescing, a means for gathering the nation together and unifying the people against this common enemy. Invoking the Defense Production Act in order to make military resources available for civilian use, the president explained: “To this day, nobody has seen anything like what they were able to do during World War II. Now it’s our time. We must sacrifice together because we are all in this together and we’ll come through together.” Referencing the country’s mass mobilisation during the Second World War and superimposing it on the current pandemic crisis he identified as this generation’s war, he appealed to the same sense of national solidarity and shared sacrifice to characterise the country’s response to Covid-19. Again, this kind of framing holds personal political benefit for the president. A wartime president who is seen as unifying the people together against a common enemy that threatens the nation and the very fabric of American life is more likely to generate support as opposed to criticism. As a president with historically low approval ratings, in an election year being seen as a unifying leader, standing in defence and pursuit of national values, has its advantages for Trump. But, it comes with an inherent risk. If you claim to be fighting a war, you have to show that you are winning that war. FDR was rewarded for being seen as winning the war against totalitarianism in Europe and Japan. President Johnson was punished for his perceived failures in his domestic war against poverty and foreign war in Vietnam.
Therefore, while the frame might be different, reflecting the circumstances the nation faces, the president has relied on his normal reflex of using rhetoric as a means to advance his political ambitions. Such a use of language is not uncommon; in fact, it is among the most common rhetorical reflexes a president has. Indeed, it was Rahm Emanuel – former Chief of Staff to Presidents Clinton and Obama – who famous quipped that ‘you never let a good crisis go to waste.’
What has been strikingly different about President Trump’s response to this crisis – and something that has been reflective of his broader presidential approach – is his use of language within this kind of unifying frame – as a tool of division, particularly the stoking international division. Speaking from the Oval Office in a Primetime Address – a communications venue developed to reflect national leadership and unity – Trump opened his remarks by identifying the geographical origin of the Covid-19 outbreak. Throughout his speech he spoke of the need to confront this “foreign virus,” and lambasted the European Union for its failure to put in place travel restrictions sooner. The result was, he concluded, that, “a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travellers from Europe.” Put simply, the virus was the cause of other nations; it was their fault, the reason that Americans now faced danger. In the days following his speech, Trump has redoubled his identification of the virus as a specifically foreign enemy. In both tweets and delivered comments he has spoken of the ‘China’ or ‘Chinese Virus’. Arguably, beyond the images of hospital beds, ambulances, Italians singing from their balconies or the Spanish clapping hospital workers each night, one of the striking images of the political response to the Covid-19 crisis will be of the crossed out ‘corona’ in one of President Trump’s prepared remarks, and replaced – in his signature sharpie pen – with the word ‘Chinese’.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
In this way Trump has returned to his familiar rhetorical trait: blame foreigners. His solution has remained the same: ban them or build a wall to keep them out. Throughout his remarks on coronavirus, there has been an echo of his rhetoric when announcing his campaign – then it was Mexico’s fault – and his explanation for his travel ban and immigration stances – it was Muslim’s fault on those many occasions. Speaking at a rally in late February, the president claimed that: “Border security is also health security, and you’ve seen the wall has gone up like magic.” More recently, his tweets on the virus have been littered with references to the need to build a wall more than ever. For Trump, protection comes from keeping people out of America; that is his solution. Of course, we can all rationally conclude that a wall will do nothing about an invisible virus. I suspect even Trump knows this. What he is actually saying – and this again reflects his message on immigration – is that non-American people are contaminated in some way – in this case the Chinese and Europeans – and in order to protect America and Americans these people need to be stopped.
Trump’s rhetorical response then bears all the hallmarks of his search to assert his normalcy: a pursuit of political and personal validation and even more noteworthy, the identification of foreigners as the cause of a problem, difficulty or challenge.
Coronavirus Politics
Politics has never been far from discussion around the coronavirus in America. Discussion of the president’s handling has, to a large degree, dwarfed the public health emergency. Watching and comparing the evening news in Ireland and the United States, this politicisation is stark. By the decisions he has taken, Trump has politicised the crisis, both domestically and internationally. From explicitly calling Covid-19 a Democratic hoax or challenging Democratic governors for their responses – notably in California and New York – to his more subtle actions of approaching German virologists to work on developing a US only vaccine and his renewed concern for the stock market, Trump has himself politicised the pandemic.
Beyond the politics of coronavirus, it is important to quickly reflect on how coronavirus has changed the practice of electoral politics. Mirroring how the normal, everydayness of Americans’ lives have changed, the actual practice of politics has similarly been altered. Does anyone recall that there were primary elections this day last week and Joe Biden routed Bernie Sanders again to become, in effect, the presumptive nominee? Probably not a whole lot of people. And that’s because there has been so little conversation about it and because, bar a rather grainy iPhone video, we haven’t seen or heard much from Biden. Coronavirus has altered how political campaigning has been approached. There are no rallies or mass gatherings. Even the last Democratic debate was held in a near empty CNN studio, with only the candidates and moderators present.
Instead, greater focus has turned to online and television advertising (I wonder what Mike Bloomberg is thinking!). There is the real possibility that the large scale events we associate with a presidential campaign, those events that give it life really, could be changed. Think about the summer party conventions without a participating audience or no town halls or rallies. The impact at this stage is unknown in terms of how campaigning will happen. It was only 12 years ago that we marvelled at the Obama campaign’s innovative use of MySpace, Facebook and online fundraising. There is the very real possibility that the rest of the 2020 campaign could, in effect, become virtual. It will be interesting to see how a candidate Trump – who feeds of a raucous rally crowd – or a Joe Biden – who’s personal brand of politics is personal interaction – will fare in such a campaign environment. And that’s before we get to the problem of in person voting.
I curiously await Trump’s bid to try and renormalise presidential campaigning in the coming weeks. Campaigning and crowds are his politics – he will only be able to live without them for so long.
Looking Forward …
There are worrying and growing concerns, as the rate of infection and spread ticks up rapidly, of the impact of the Trump administration’s inaction and lost time over the course of the past three months. In the United Kingdom, there have been similar concerns raised by experts regarding the response of the Johnson Government. However, it is widely accepted that the mood change signalled at the end of last week and cemented with the recently announced in effect ‘lockdown’ reflects a change of tact and direction reflecting an increased realisation of the seriousness of the crisis.
Last week it appeared that President Trump recognised the growing seriousness and threat Covid-19 presented. Yet, there are few signs that such a change in tact from President Trump is simply an aberration rather than a long term public health and economic strategy. A quick glance of the president’s twitter and his public remarks in the last 24 hours indicate a renewed focus on the economy, getting people back to work within the coming weeks and downplaying the advice of public health professionals. It is reported that Trump’s growing focus on the economy – at the expense of public health – germinates from his concern that a weak economy will negatively impact his re-election bid later this year. Public health officials, epidemiologists and virologists worldwide have warned such a bid to waken the economy in such a way risks the further spread of disease.
More concerning, even, is the president’s willingness to risk public health by falsely claiming that the United States had found a ‘miracle cure’ in an bid to bring a premature end to the challenges he and the country is facing. At a news conference at the tail end of last week, he claimed the CDC had approved the use of anti-malaria medication – chloroquine – for treatment of Covid-19. Taking the president’s advice, a man in Phoenix has died and his wife remains seriously ill, while officials in Nigeria have warned of the dangers of taking the drug after three people in the country overdosed in the wake of President Trump’s comments.
Increasingly then there are indications that the president is seeking a quick solution to the coronavirus problem; a solution rooted not in the interests of public health but personal political expediency.
Conclusion
What Trump wants in this abnormal time is a return to his kind of normality. He has done what he can himself; brandished his political style of confusion and disorder and combined it with an oft-heard rhetoric of otherness and the enemy that have become the hallmarks of Trumpian normality. While he searches for his political normality – that place where he feels safe and validated – societal abnormality continues to infect – and ultimately alter – the approach to politics. Political calculus, in order to address the reality of this disease needs to adapt to this abnormality if America is to have any chance of ‘flattening the curve’ and controlling the spread of infections. But, I fear Trump’s desire to assert his normalcy and the reality of the situation are on a collision course, the impact of which has the potential to have significant – and very possibly, deadly – ramifications.