Mr. Trump's Wild Ride

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“[T]here’s an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only look at the last presidential election for proof of that. The public obviously wanted a figurehead, who’d look good and make comforting noises.”
-- John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Since he first emerged as a national celebrity in the 1980’s, I have regarded Donald Trump with such loathing, revulsion and utter lack of respect I didn’t think there was anything he could do that would make me hate him more than I already did. But he did it. On September 9 veteran journalist and Presidential chronicler Bob Woodward released a series of interviews he had done with Trump for a new book about him called Rage -- a follow-up to Woodward’s earlier Trump book, Fear. Though Trump hadn’t agreed to be interviewed for Fear, and he had railed against the book in public and on Twitter, for some reason he agreed to give Woodward 18 hours’ worth of interviews for Rage, both in-person and by phone, from February to July.

The most significant portions of the interviews were the ones about the current pandemic involving the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. What was most amazing and infuriating about Trump’s comments to Woodward was that as early as February 7 Trump was aware that the new virus was far more deadly than “your standard flus” and that it was particularly dangerous because it was airborne. He also quoted estimates from scientists that about 5 percent of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 would die from it. That wasn’t what Trump told the American people when he started talking about the disease the next day; he said it was “just like the flu” and it would “go away” on its own when the weather warmed up starting in April.

When I heard Trump’s dismissive public comments on the pandemic I assumed it was just Trump being his usual notoriously closed-minded self. I thought he was using that part of his brain that comes to a firm conclusion and clings to it no matter how many facts contradict it. I thought he was doing with SARS-CoV-2 what he’d done when he said during the 2016 campaign that “I know more about ISIS than the generals” and got into endless arguments with his economic advisers over his tariffs on China and other countries, (Trump clung to the notion that by putting tariffs on China he was costing the Chinese money; in fact, Americans pay the cost of those tariffs through higher prices for goods.)

What was so shocking about the statements Trump made to Woodward was they proved he knew the truth about the pandemic all along -- and yet he chose in his public statements to the people of the country he was supposed to be leading to say just the opposite. What’s more, he told Woodward that was precisely what he was doing. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” More recently, Trump has defended his feel-good public pronouncements on SARS-CoV-2 by saying they were meant to show “confidence” and “strength.” He added, “You cannot show a sense of panic, or you’re going to have bigger problems than you had before.”

Never mind that in the three political campaigns Trump has been involved with since he first announced for President in 2015 Trump has always tried to get people to vote for him and his Republican Party by panicking them about some threat he was either wildly inflating or totally making up. In 2016 it was alleged hordes of “murderers, rapists [and] drug dealers” seeking to immigrate to the U.S, from Mexico. In the 2018 midterm campaign it was “caravans” full of “bad hombres” trying to sneak into the U.S. to swell the ranks of Central American gangs like MS-13 (which is real, but actually started in the U.S.) and slaughter Americans right and left.

Today it’s marauding bands of Black Lives Matter protesters whom Trump routinely denounces as “anarchists,” “socialists” and members of Antifa ready to sweep through suburbs, destroy property and rape the “suburban housewives” Trump says he’s protecting by not enforcing the laws against racial discrimination in housing (laws Trump’s company was convicted of violating in the 1970’s, by the way). “Antifa” exists, but it’s mostly a loose federation of college students -- mostly white and relatively well-to-do -- whose purpose is either to prevent Right-wing speakers from appearing on college campuses or disrupting their talks if they are presented.

I don’t agree with Antifa’s tactics -- I’m a First Amendment absolutist who believes the solution to bad speech is not to shut (or shout) it down but to overwhelm it with good speech -- but the cartoon version of it Trump presents is just ridiculous. Besides, as my husband Charles pointed out, if you’re against “Antifa” -- whose name is shorthand for “anti-fascist” -- does that make you “profa”? Certainly Trump has shown an astonishing love of dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman -- all of whom have ordered the murders of their critics -- while dismissing America’s traditional demoicratic allies. He’s attempted to allocate money for his pet projects by executive fiat -- under our Constitution it’s the job of Congress, not the President, to decide how the federal government spends its money.

Trump and his pet attorney general, William Barr, have taken over the defense of the defamation lawsuit filed against him by a woman he allegedly raped. In traditional monarchies this is called lese-majeste, the doctrine that the King can do no wrong and therefore it is the job of government to punish anyone who says anything nasty or critical about the King. Like the 17th and 18th century French king Louis XIV -- who said “L’etat c’est moi” (“The state? It is I”) and was known as the “Sun-King” because, he said, the nation revolved around him the way the earth revolves around the sun, Trump sees himself not as a constitutional president but an absolute monarch whose will is -- or at least should be -- law.

Why Did Trump Downplay the Pandemic?

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Trump’s bizarre attitude towards SARS-CoV-2 -- downplaying the threat of the virus and the COVID-19 in public while acknowledging the best available science on it in private to Bob Woodward -- is what on earth was in it for Donald Trump. Much of the case against Trump is based on the idea that he really doesn’t give a damn about any other human being besides Donald Trump -- indeed, the Democratic convention’s main pitch for Joe Biden as an alternative is that Biden is a normal human being who actually cares about other people -- but it’s still hard to figure out what Trump had to gain (or thought he had to gain) by deliberately following a path of evasion and obfuscation that has likely led to almost 200,000 Americans dying of COVID-19, many of whom might have been saved by more decisive and science-driven action from Trump and the federal government.

Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian tried to explain that in her column September 13. She said Trump downplayed the danger from SARS-CoV-2 “[b]ecause the truth would do nothing to boost support for his re-election.” She argued that Trump couldn’t acknowledge the truth because it would have compelled him to stop holding the big Nuremberg-style rallies -- six of them, all indoors (and therefore more efficient at spreading the virus), in the 3 ½ weeks following his first interview with Woodward, without requiring attendees either to wear masks or stay six feet apart from each other -- Trump sees as crucial both for energizing his base and maintaining his own morale.

Trump, Abcarian argued, “did not lie about COVID because he feared he would panic Americans. He lied about COVID for entirely selfish reasons. He knew he was not capable of handling a national catastrophe, and he needed those rallies for his ego. His need to be venerated far outweighs his concern for the lives of his supporters, or anyone else.”

And yet I’m not so sure that if Trump had chosen his Road Not Taken -- had he leveled with the American people starting February 8 and taken the crisis seriously from Day One -- it wouldn’t have been better for Donald Trump. Had he pushed masks and so-called “social distancing” from the beginning -- had he turned himself into a promotion for responsibility by wearing a mask in public himself -- had he called for a quicker and more complete shutdown of the U.S. economy and fully invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure doctors and hospitals had all the equipment they needed to fight the disease and treat the people with it, Trump would probably be coasting to an easy re-election instead of fighting to close a narrowing but still pesky gap in the polls.

In his most recent public rally at an airport in Michigan, Trump had the gall to compare himself to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as wartime leaders. I was particularly fascinated by that because I’d already started thinking of Churchill’s leadership of Britain during World War II as not only the polar opposite of Trump’s, but as the model for what America’s policy towards SARS-CoV-2 should have been.

Winston Churchill took office in early 1940, when World War II was just a few months old and Britain was getting its ass kicked by its principal opponents, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He didn’t lie to the British people. He didn’t sugar-coat the danger they were in. He began his first speech as prime minister by calling it “a solemn hour,” and later he said, “I have never promised the British people anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat.” It’s true that when something did go right for Britain’s war effort, like the successful evacuation of most of the British army from Dunkirk, France or Britain’s ability to mount a capable defense against Nazi bombers in the Battle of Britain, Churchill publicly praised it.

But Churchill never told the British people that they wouldn’t have to sacrifice. He was honest that many of them would lose their properties and comforts because of the war, and some of them would lose their lives. And he did something else that boosted the British people: when their cities were bombed, Churchill would visit the ruins. He would talk to people who had lost their homes and everything they owned, comfort them and assure them that it would all be worth it in the end. Churchill’s visits to bombing sites were so effective Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels tried to persuade Adolf Hitler to do the same when the Allies started bombing Germany. (Hitler never went to a bombed-out site in Germany. Perhaps he was worried about messing up his hair.)

Had Trump done the right thing and responded to SARS-CoV-2 the way he should have -- had he acted on the information he repeated to Bob Woodward on February 7 -- the pandemic would have done for him what the 9/11 attacks did for George W. Bush. Had Trump followed the advice of the actual scientists on his task force and locked down the country more quickly and more completely, he would in fact have been the strong, decisive leader he sees himself as now. A successful containment of the virus and a major public-health effort both to stop its spread and take care of people who had it would have established Trump as a leader to reckon with.

Perhaps, as Right-wing commentator Erick Erickson argued in a column Abcarian quoted from, “If Trump had raised the alarm in February, Democrats and much of the media would have claimed he was trying to distract from the impeachment. You can deny it all you want, but it is true.” (Trump was acquitted by the Republican Senate on February 5, two days before his first interview with Woodward.) But if the Democrats and the media had reacted the way Erickson says they would have, they would have looked small-minded and even dangerous. They would quickly have realized there was no way to gain politically from attacking a fact- and reason-based response to the pandemic -- even if it happened to come from Donald Trump.

Indeed, had Trump followed the Road Not Taken on SARS-CoV-2 he might have been able to get through other parts of his agenda the way George W. Bush was able to use the “War on Terror” to launch a stupid, unnecessary and counterproductive war in Iraq (which the two Democratic Presidential nominees who’ve faced Trump both voted for, by the way). Trump actually was benefiting in the polls in the early days of the pandemic -- his approval ratings in polls approached 50 percent -- reflecting a national tendency to rally behind the leader in a time of crisis.

Trump’s “COVID bounce” in the polls didn’t last, but it could have if he’d put together the planning and hard work needed to sustain an effective response to the virus. That, I suspect, is the real reason he didn’t. Trump has always been an executive who wants to get by on as little hard work as possible, and he’s also a master improviser who hates the whole notion of planning. To me the most revealing thing Bob Woodward had to say about Trump in his first book about him, Fear, was that Trump felt 2012 Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney had spent too much time and energy planning for what he would do as President and too little time and energy making sure he won the election. Trump saw Romney’s planning as a “jinx” and was not about to repeat his “mistake.”

The characteristics needed to lead a successful response to a public health crisis are not that different from those needed to win a war. They require both the ability to make and follow through on a plan and the ability to change course if circumstances require it. Trump has neither of those skills. As I was thinking over this article I called my brother and he asked me if America had ever faced a national crisis with a President less suited for the task of leading us through it, I answered, “James Buchanan” -- the Pennsylvania Democrat and Southern sympathizer who was the last President before the Civil War and unwittingly did just about everything he could to bring that conflict on and make it longer and bloodier.

Pulling America out of its SARS-CoV-2 crisis won’t be easy no matter who wins the Presidential election in November. By now the whole idea of whether there is a viral threat at all, let alone what we should do about it, has become so politicized the very act of wearing or not wearing a mask outdoors has become as much a statement of political allegiance as a MAGA hat. Even if Trump loses (and I fully expect him to win, both because polls have repeatedly underestimated his level of support and the Republicans are doing so well at suppressing the potential vote against him), he will still be out there with 1.4 million followers on Twitter ready to join him in a scorched-earth campaign against anything the Democrats will try to do about anything.

I began this article quoting a 1972 science-fiction novel by the late John Brunner called The Sheep Look Up. It’s mostly about a cascading series of environmental catastrophes, including pollution that literally blots out the sun, the death of the Mediterranean Sea, the elimination of beaches as places of recreation, a series of pandemics that sweeps the world one after another, and at the end of the book a giant fire that burns all of what’s left of the United States of America. It’s also about the power of “the Syndicate,” the corporate ruling class which runs everything, to quietly and methodically eliminate any individual or group that tries to resist; and about “Prexy,” the idiot Americans have elected President who ignores the evidence of environmental destruction and regards going after pro-environment activists as his first priority.

As the California forests burn, as the government tells us to wear face masks and wash our hands repeatedly, as it gets harder and more expensive to buy decent, healthy food and a pandemic sweeps the world, John Brunner’s dystopian fiction begins to look more and more like dystopian fact. And Donald Trump, who has never met a source of pollution he doesn’t want to see increase, leads his nation and his planet closer and faster to the ultimate catastrophe that will either render the human race extinct or at least decimate us and throw us off our perch atop the biosphere.