Steve McGookinThere’s an old saying: “Don’t blame a clown for acting like a clown. Ask yourself why you keep going to the circus.”
By any measure of what passes for normal in the presidency of Donald Trump, this has been a strange week and it’s not over yet. But it’s not like we don’t know by now what to expect, so it seems pointless to complain about it.
President Trump’s nightly appearances at the Coronavirus Task Force briefings – which have taken the place of campaign rallies in giving him a spotlight, an adrenaline rush of control and a stage full of fawning subordinates – have consistently set new standards of disinformation and deflection throughout this crisis.
This week, though, as the death toll from the virus continued to grow and with the public more than ever craving information that is credible, the exasperated reaction among many watching has been, simply, “incredible.”
“Jaw-dropping” “unhinged” “meltdown” and “dumpster fire” are phrases that have been used so often to describe this president’s interactions with the media that they have lost a significant part of their impact. But they have all been on full display so far this week, in a perfect storm of narcissism and self-promotion, as Trump has sought to fight back against what he sees as an onslaught of criticism of his handling of the greatest health emergency in a century.
In the Briefing Room on Monday, the president was clearly angry, turning to the “airing of grievances” part of the session straight out of the gate. Some reporters said he had been triggered by stories over the weekend like this one in the New York Times outlining the flaws in his response to the virus. He was intent on setting things straight.
He turned his rage on the assembled reporters, scowling at them as he showed a video touting his accomplishments and why the media had gotten it all wrong. He was like a small child showing off a school project a parent had made for him, smirking and reveling in the feeling of putting one over on those forced to watch. A reporter asked about the video’s origin, perhaps only half expecting the answer to be the White House and not Pyongyang.
Every single presidential briefing these days in one way or another is an attempt to rewrite history, but this one seemed particularly detached from the reality of what is happening in the world beyond the White House gates, or the broader implications for the country, not just for the man who purports to lead it.
The FT’s Martin Wolf, writing this week about the damage to the global economy from the virus, explained how “a microbe has overthrown our arrogance.” Not everywhere, sadly, as the president – having finished with the media (as if he’s ever really finished with them) – set off on a potential collision course with some of the nation’s Governors over his claim of “total authority.”
Dalia Lithwick wrote in Slate that a jurisdictional dispute with the states is part of a pattern and “the latest manifestation of Trump’s distorted view of his own power.” Gov Andrew Cuomo of New York called the president’s assertion “absurd” and it even drew pushback from some constitutional Republicans uneasy with the image of Trump as a monarch.
By Tuesday morning the president was tweeting about “Mutiny on the Bounty” being one of his favorite movies and hinting at the states’ Governors being ranged against him were the potentially disobedient subordinates who won’t recognize his authority. It’s always possible, of course, he was thinking of a different movie altogether, perhaps “The Caine Mutiny,” featuring a brilliant performance by Humphrey Bogart as the deranged, paranoid Captain Queeg. As Nick Gillespie writes at Reason, though, the analogy can work both ways.
Perhaps the most troubling thing about Monday’s session, however, was an almost throwaway line by a clearly unsettled Vice-President Mike Pence who, when called upon to defend his boss, doubled-down on his behalf, saying the president’s powers were “unquestionably plenary.” These may be unusual times, but the Founding Fathers might like a word.
And all the while, amid this pantomime of ego and anger, Americans were dying. Ninety-three, in fact, between 5.30 and 7.45, according to NBC’s Katy Tur.
WHO are you?
On Tuesday evening in the Rose Garden, we saw the president begin to frame a narrative of deflection, scapegoating the World Health Organization with an announcement he was cutting US funding for the UN body pending some kind of undefined investigation into what he called its mismanagement of the early days of the global outbreak.
The decision attracted the expected criticism but it served Trump’s purpose in that it drew attention to the organization’s shortcomings and rationalized a seed of blame in the minds of his supporters.
Of the health specialist members of the “task force” Dr Anthony Fauci was not in attendance while Dr Deborah Birx sat in the front row for much of the hour’s delay beforehand, but did not speak once the presser started. Neither did Vice-President Pence, who was probably glad of the break after he seemed to be caught off guard the previous night and forced to fall back on native sycophancy.
The president’s priorities for the day were clear as he name-checked a list of CEOs and business leaders who he said would be advising him on when and how to “open up” the economy and to return the country to some uncertain form of activity. Their input, of course, offers him some layer of insulation if something was to go wrong, either in a failure of the economy to ‘kickstart’ or if the virus was to bite back in a subsequent wave of new cases.
The following day, again in the Rose Garden, was more of the same, including a threat to adjourn both houses of Congress ostensibly so the president could push through nominees for unfilled vacancies – complete with an unexpectedly harsh attack on Voice of America as he expanded his roster of blameworthy targets.
There were also some lengthy complaints about “roadblocks” and a celebration of his – or Mitch McConnell’s – accomplishments in the appointment of federal judges.
There was one significant moment, which will undoubtedly drive several news cycles from Fox and Friends through the rest of the day, when Fox’s John Roberts got the president to lend credibility to a story that the Coronavirus originated in a virology lab in Wuhan.
This, along with the targeting of the WHO, is likely to be an important plank in the deflection and blame strategy in the medium term and probably on into the election. Expect it to be hammered home to the base at every opportunity, and in necessarily simplistic terms.
But Wednesday was primarily all about setting the table for the “reopening” of the country – or at least parts of it – with the president seemingly committed to his May 1st target date, regardless of what individual state Governors might think.
Rebecca Leber at Mother Jones wrote that what is a crucial process at a delicate time is being treated like it’s reality TV; and sure enough, the president teased an announcement on Thursday about the guidelines the White House plans to present to the Governors.
Thursday also saw the latest round of jobless numbers, with some five million new claims this week, a reminder that, regardless of the posturing, what is happening now has real effects on real people. Any move the president makes to re-balance the priorities between the nation’s health and the health of its economy must include recognition of the immense sacrifice the public has made in order to flatten the curve in the first place and make any such “reopening” possible.
Wednesday’s presser ended when the president decided it was too cold.
What does all this say about us?
Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic that with each successive appearance, Trump is “making us worse people.”
“Each of these presidential therapy sessions corrodes us until the moment when the president finally shambles away in a fog of muttered slogans and paranoid sentence fragments. In a time of crisis, we should be finding what is best in ourselves. Trump, instead, invites us to join a daily ritual, to hear lines from a scared and mean little boy’s heroic play-acting about how he bravely defeated the enemies and scapegoats who told him to do things that would hurt us. He insists that he has never been wrong and that he isn’t responsible for anything ever.”
This week has predictably reanimated the debate in political and media circles surrounding the wisdom of broadcasters carrying these petty, angry displays of ego live, and whether they add anything to our collective public knowledge at a time when we need clear accurate information directly related to the nation’s health and welfare. There’s also plenty of debate among journalists themselves about exactly why they’re covering the Trump show.
In a good, detailed piece, Peter Kafka at Vox argues that the media is certainly far from blameless in its coverage not just of Trump but of the emergency as a whole. He says: “This core challenge for journalists won’t go away after the pandemic: There are always going to be threats that could eventually lead to disaster, but most of them don’t. If we holler every time we see one, we’ll be wrong and no one will listen to us. If we don’t holler when there’s a real one, we will have let down our audience.”
The president’s public face this week has been a worst-case study in crisis communications. Even with his long-established scorn for science, giving people hope of a return to normality is one thing, but at a time when the most valuable commodity is credibility, everything has become desperately symbolic – from something as populist as pressing for the early return of the nation’s pastime to something as pointlessly vain as insisting that his name be printed on the actual cheques being sent out to millions of people to help them through the devastating economic impact.
He – and we – can only hope that for many of them, any “reopening” of the economy doesn’t end up worsening their already precarious situation.
What does it mean for politics?
We’re roughly six months away from election day and it’s difficult to get an accurate read on the political mood of the country – even in the midst of a pandemic, something that you’d think would act as a unifying force to give citizens a sense of urgency and collective purpose.
Out in the real world, though, there are mixed indicators.
The president took a hit on Monday night when a Republican incumbent on the Wisconsin Supreme Court lost his seat in the election that was forced to controversially go ahead in person last week. The outcome could indicate that attempts to suppress the vote in key states might not end well for the GOP.
On the other side of the coin, by Wednesday there were armed protesters on the steps of the Michigan State Capital in Lansing objecting to the anti-virus stay-at-home order by Gov Gretchen Whitmer, while a crowd descended on Ohio Gov Mike DeWine’s office.
With the involvement of a Trump cabinet member and Fox News fanning the flames it’s likely that such a strategy will be replicated in other states, creating visuals of ordinary people somehow rising up against measures that appear to have had a mitigating effect on the spread of the virus, but which they argue are constraining their freedom.
Against such a backdrop of extreme political polarization, the week saw the return of one grown-up voice that has been missing from our civic discourse.
President Obama’s endorsement of Joe Biden had to wait until Bernie Sanders had done the same, but will help promote the concept – if not yet the execution – of party unity well in advance of the summer campaign proper.
It came as the perfect antidote to Trump’s self-congratulatory bombast, the sort of reassuring humility and innate human empathy that the nation has been missing at a crucial time – what the Washington Post called “a lesson in perfectly performed naturalness.”
And it offered a reminder that we’re all getting a little greyer.
There were muted hits against Trump – the message never mentions the president by name, but by association with his party. There’s also significant praise for Bernie Sanders as Democrats try to bring their competing wings together amid concerns over how to fight a very different type of election – one with a unconventional convention for example – and with concerns over turnout, particularly if current circumstances persist.
Of course, it goes without saying that no-one knows how the world will look in six months.
With each one of his pressers, as we saw this week, the current incumbent has shown clearly where his priorities lie – with his re-election, ratings and what’s left of his reputation. But whatever boost Trump may have picked up in his approval rating by mid-March is back down to where it was earlier in the month.
It seems clear that among the committed there is precious little common ground and little possibility of crossover – pretty much as things have been since 2016. If you support the president, you probably still will regardless of his handling of the virus; if you oppose him, his actions and behavior will just prove further reasons for doing so. Independents, together with those who stayed home last time, will prove crucial.
For what its worth, an Economist/YouGov poll on Wednesday shows Biden with a five-point lead nationally, in line with his six-point lead last week.
There’s a long way to go until election day, certainly, but if this week has shown us anything it is that a key theme of the campaign, and what will be on people’s minds as they go to vote, will be trust – trust in the government and institutions and trust in the person in the White House to manage what remains of this crisis and plot a course out of the economic wreckage that could easily last for the entire term of whoever is elected on November 3rd.
Trump’s supporters often say he’s at his best when he has an “enemy” – someone or something to turn his fire towards and rally his base to do the same. It has worked well for him so far. Over the past few days it has come into focus where that animus will fall over the coming weeks and months. The problem with a virus is it’s hard to find an infantile, derogatory nickname for it that doesn’t understate its potential to kill thousands of people.
Prominent conservative commentator Bill Kristol tweeted: “If I were advising the Biden campaign, I might say: Run Biden as an American. A plain old American. ‘I’m an old man… One last service for my country… I will restore honor, decency, and dignity to the White House, and allow America to get on with life.”
Maybe. But there also has to be some sense of what life will look like beyond the current emergency. That’s why Biden will have to emphasize the “bridge to the future” idea he talked about during the primaries – and it’s also why he’s unlikely to choose Elizabeth Warren as his VP, despite her apparent willingness after endorsing him on Wednesday.
And if someone at the Biden campaign hasn’t already cut this clip of Trump lashing out at the WHO into an attack ad, they’re not doing their job.
But somehow you just know there will plenty more opportunities before this is done.
For more articles making sense of US politics, see also:
In Pivotal Week, Virus Leaves Politics in Disarray – Apr 10
Faith and Moral Bankruptcy – Mar 26
In Shadow of Virus, Biden puts Distance Between Himself and Sanders – Mar 18
Last Man Standing – Mar 10
South Carolina – Comeback Kid Set for Super Tuesday Showdown – Mar 2
New Hampshire – Not Even The End of the Beginning – Feb 13
Democrats Look to Put Iowa Behind Them – Feb 8
And read Julia Flanagan on the Democratic debates here:
Democrats face Foreign Policy Test – December
The Road To Iowa Goes Through Georgia – November
A Dozen Deliberative Dems Debate – October
And Then There Were Ten… For Now – September
