It’s becoming more and more obvious that President Donald Trump has simply stopped dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, and has no particular plan for confronting its economic fallout, either. In both cases, he’s pretty much substituted wishful thinking for action. The Atlantic’s David Graham had a good item about this disengagement earlier in the week, followed by one from Ezra Klein arguing that “the White House does not have a plan, it does not have a framework, it does not have a philosophy, and it does not have a goal.”
What surprised me was political scientist Lee Drutman’s conclusion, based on Klein’s article, that “the debate over what to do has polarized with depressing haste, because ‘winning’ in Washington is not defeating the virus, but winning the next election.” I argued a bit with Drutman on Twitter about this, but it’s worth a longer discussion. My basic sense is that Trump isn’t nearly concerned enough with winning re-election, and that the current catastrophe is in part a consequence of that.
There’s no way to know what’s really in the president’s mind. But we can compare his actions with what a president determined to be re-elected would probably do. A lot of Trump’s critics have claimed that he’s deliberately risking American lives by boosting the economy to improve his chances in November. And it’s true that he seems concerned mainly with re-opening businesses these days. But there are at least two reasons to doubt that this preference is due to the election. For one, public-health experts and economists broadly agree that opening too soon will be a disaster. For another, even if there is a trade-off, there’s no particular reason to think that restoring jobs at the cost of more illness and death will be a good electoral deal for Trump.
At any rate, the evidence that Trump has an economic plan is just as weak as the evidence that he’s engaged in dealing with the coronavirus.
What I think is more likely is that Trump simply isn’t finding this aspect of the presidency very much fun. You might remember when President George H.W. Bush declared that he didn’t like broccoli: “And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!” Trump acts this way about doing most of the mundane jobs of the presidency. Thus his newly invented scandal, “Obamagate.” As the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser points out: “For Trump, spending the week attacking Obama, no matter what the subject, is the political equivalent of retreating to his bedroom and hiding under the blanket. It’s his safe space, his comfort zone.” Except it’s not so much a political equivalent as it is a retreat from politics altogether, along with the duties and responsibilities of his office.
A politician who desperately wanted re-election would’ve been hard at work, from the moment he or she was alerted to the danger, attempting to contain the pandemic and limit the economic damage, and would persevere no matter what the setbacks, never wavering in an effort to produce the policy results that might lead to a big win in November. Such presidents might sacrifice the long term for the short term, as Lyndon Johnson did in goosing the economy in 1964, or Richard Nixon did in 1972. But they would never just give up when things went wrong.
That’s not this president. That’s not Donald Trump.
Mr. Bernstein may be indulging in a little reverse psychology because in actual fact, of course Donald wants to be re-elected. I'd say he cares about winning in November more that life itself, if only to avoid being branded a LOSER. Why hasn't he been hard at work from the start, attempting to contain the pandemic and limit the economic damage, persevering no matter what the setbacks, etc? That's easy. He's just not capable of it.
What does surprise me is that there is apparently no one in the administration who has the smarts to handle a crisis. In truth, it doesn't surprise me, it's been clear all along. It's just that this is the biggest crisis the Trump administration had faced and it's happening within sight of the election. You would think that Ivanka, Jared and the vice president, in particular, would have a vested interest in helping Donald to succeed at this, but nope. The slobbering, ass-kissing sycophantic-ness of Mike Pence continues to astonish (and disgust) me, but it's not just him. There's mind-boggling incompetence from one end of the White House to the other.
And one more thing: In November, Steve Schmidt, a former Republican political operative and one of the Never Trumpers behind the Lincoln Project (read more here,) said that he thinks Donald will dump Mike Pence for Nikki Haley as his running mate this year. (I wrote about it here.) This was before the coronavirus crisis started but it occurs to me now that with Pence in charge of the response, doesn't that make him a convenient scapegoat for the whole bungled mess? Maybe Donald really will give him the boot.
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