The poll finding from earlier this week — that some 60% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic — was nearly enough to drive me to despair about democracy. (60% means many more people than just the Trump cult.) It’s of some comfort that this approval has apparently been eroding. In any event, one cannot give up the fight, and so I’ll have the following piece appearing as an op/ed this Sunday in the Lynchburg, Virginia newspaper, the News & Advance. (Lynchburg is the home of Liberty University — which looms menacingly over the town, and which is headed by Jerry Falwell, Jr., a major ally of Donald Trump who has defied the general directives for Virginians and has invited students back to the University while the pandemic continues to gain steam.)
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Our most immediate crisis, of course, is the pandemic. But for the long-term future of the nation, the most vital political issue for us Americans remains: Will Donald Trump be given a second term to serve as President of the United States, or should the powers of the presidency be taken out of his hands?
We should be capable of dealing with both. Our coping with the pandemic, in other words, must not stop us Americans from examining any important new information that bears upon that crucial presidential choice.
Which means that we Americans need to consider what the coronavirus crisis has shown us about Trump as President.
It is true that Trump has lately come around – albeit not only belatedly but also still only partially and fitfully -- to acting like a President, which means looking after the interests of the nation he was elected to serve.
But it would be a dereliction of our duty as citizens for us to forget what Trump showed us – for more than two months -- with how he choose to deal with the approaching pandemic. For no America president, facing a crisis, has made choices like those we’ve seen Trump make:
From the outset, his clear overriding concern was to protect his personal political interest -- getting re-elected -- at the cost of failing to protect the American people from a serious pandemic.
(Check the video: virtually everything that Trump said about the crisis for two months was false, apparently deliberately so. He clearly feared people’s knowing the truth would hurt him politically.)
As everyone in the public health field knows: the choices Trump made will certainly mean that more Americans will get sick and more Americans will die than could and should have happened.
MORAL DEFECT
That shows a moral defect terribly dangerous in a President – especially in a crisis when a President’s looking out for the nation is of especial importance, whether that crisis be World War II, or the financial crisis, or this pandemic.
(This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this self-serving and nation-betraying aspect of his character: that same moral defect was at the heart of that Ukraine quid pro quo that led to his impeachment. But this time, it is not “the nation” that Trump has sacrificed for his own advantage (“help me besmirch my political rival or I won’t help you resist Russian aggression”). This time, it is the American people he chose to sacrifice, including millions of Americans whose support put him into the Presidency and has kept him there.)
Calling attention to this is not about “finger-pointing” at a time of crisis, when we’re called to come together. It is about our understanding something important that bears on the crucial decisions we’ll soon have to make as American citizens.
It’s about not allowing what we’ve seen be pushed down the memory hole, while Trump declares he’d give himself a “10” (on a scale of 1-10) for his handling of the coronavirus crisis (and while Mike Pence goes around heaping praise on Trump for the great job he’s claimed to have done from the outset).
Trump has come around, yes. But we’ve seen that he had to be dragged into it by the reality that a pandemic – unlike so much else that has threatened his position – could not be swept out of his supporters’ awareness by his usual approach of lying and minimizing and denying.
(And this President continues regularly to make dangerously misleading statements that not only American experts in epidemiology but also the Republican governors of various states feel compelled to contradict.)
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DEFECT OF UNDERSTANDING
Consider also, though, what it says about Trump that he believed he could deal with this pandemic in such a way. That belief points to an intellectual defect as serious as the moral defect, for it shows how fundamentally Trump failed to understand the nature of our situation.
A pandemic is a natural phenomenon -- like a hurricane, or a plague of locusts, or an earthquake or tsunami. Such things will move as they will. They cannot be hidden or talked away.
Trump not only failed to understand that on his own, he evidently persisted in that misunderstanding despite the continual efforts of public health experts to educate him about the inescapable realities of this viral contagion moving across the globe and across the nation.
(It was apparently because of this problem – that nobody can tell Trump anything -- that Trump’s Secretary of State (Tillerson) famously declared Trump a “f…ing moron,” and that his Chief of Staff (Gen. Kelly) called him “an idiot.”)
So Trump – who once declared he knows “more about ISIS than the Generals” – ignored the advice of the experts in epidemiology doing their best to persuade Trump to take the actions that American public health required.
(Then, when the experts started talking to the American public, Trump’s first impulse was to try to muzzle them. But then, when the experts persisted, Trump began holding joint press conferences in which Trump repeatedly spoke falsehoods that the experts were repeatedly compelled to step up to the microphone to contradict.)
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DISQUALIFYING
When it comes to Trump’s falsehoods, it is often unclear whether he believes what he’s saying or if he’s deliberately lying.
If Trump actually believed what he said about the pandemic, we need to recognize: he’s a fool– in ways that endanger the people who rely upon his judgement for their protection. If he was deliberately lying –– deliberately sacrificing the health of many and the lives some to serve his own lust for power -- he’s a sociopath– in ways that endanger the people who depend upon their President to look out for them.(A sociopath: a person lacking both conscience and compassion, ruled by unbounded selfishness.)
Even though a President’s being either a fool or a sociopath would be plenty sufficient reason for Americans to choose to take the powers of the presidency out of his hands, Trump has shown strong signs of being both.
And even if we’d witnessed nothing else from this President, what Trump’s conduct in this pandemic crisis has revealed should make us glad that we will have the opportunity later this year to put those powers into the hands of another leader.
(And whatever his limitations, Joe Biden has shown himself to be a reliably decent, responsible man, whose long history proves that he can be trusted to serve the nation, to care about its people, and to use the tools of government with reasonable competence to improve things.)