The novel coronavirus brings out the same old, same old President.
A week ago, President Trump foreshadowed his growing anxiety over when and how to end the Great Shutdown, a decision he is well aware will have existential consequences—for his own political future. He called the question of reopening the country amid the coronavirus pandemic “the biggest decision I’ll ever make” and “by far the biggest decision of my life.” Yet by the time Trump advertised a “Major News Conference” for Thursday evening, there was little suspense from a man who has been tweeting about a “LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL” and who declared, on March 24th, that he wanted church pews “packed” by Easter. Trump backed off the Easter deadline within days of promoting it, and he repeated the act this week, with a May 1st date and a new plan for “OPENING UP AMERICA AGAIN,” which started out on Monday as an imperial diktat from an almighty President and ended up on Thursday as a mere recommendation to individual states, without a fixed date. Many governors have already announced that they will not follow his guidance. “You’re going to call your own shots,” Trump reassured them on a conference call on Thursday afternoon, according to an audio recording, which promptly leaked. “You’re going to be calling the shots.”
This might seem a head-spinning reversal. But it is classic Trump. His two most memorable lines of the covid-19 pandemic, proclaiming “absolute authority” and “no responsibility at all,” are wildly contradictory, and yet also completely consistent with his approach to governing. The novel coronavirus is truly a new type of American crisis, but it has been met by the same old, same old from America’s President: unhinged press conferences and unfounded conspiracy theories; lies, attacks, and bizarre non sequiturs; and abrupt, seemingly incomprehensible policy shifts from a leader who has no problem changing course at the expense of his own credibility.
A few weeks ago, Trump declared war on an “invisible enemy.” Now he says that he is beginning “the next front in our war” after “incredible progress” has been made. This grandiose proclamation came on a day when more than two thousand Americans died. On Wednesday, a record twenty-five hundred people died. As of Thursday, more than twenty-two million Americans have filed for unemployment since the pandemic began, a shattering statistic that came out the same morning that the Small Business Administration acknowledged that its three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar bailout program was already out of money. The I.M.F. now forecasts a severe recession for advanced economies like that of the United States, lasting into next year. Horror stories abound: dead bodies stashed in an empty room at a Michigan hospital; seventeen corpses hidden in a New Jersey nursing home. Yet Wall Street has had a good week. That, and signs of incipient conservative backlash against government restrictions, symbolized by a handful of protests in several Midwestern states by Trump-sign-toting crowds, are the data points the President seems to prefer. Continue reading.