It’s hard for president to spin straight-up chaos
There’s only one thing members of my industry appear to enjoy more than demeaning U.S. President Donald Trump: declaring him indestructible.
Can you recall how many times you’ve read the words “Teflon” and “Trump” side by side in the news since the man was elected four years ago?
I’ve lost count, but here are just a few recent examples: “Donald Trump’s Puzzling Teflon Presidency,” ran a headline in the Japan Times last December. In February, USA Today wondered if Trump is “tougher than Teflon.” In April 2019, the Guardian referred to the U.S. president as “Teflon Don” and, in April 2020, the Spectator posed the question: “Can Teflon Trump survive his biggest challenge yet?”
That challenge was and remains COVID-19, a virus that has killed nearly 130,000 Americans to date — the same virus Trump claimed his government had “totally under control” in January. But the president faces other “challenges,” too, heading into the U.S. federal election against Joe Biden: namely, addressing the long-past-due demands of Americans protesting antiBlack racism and police brutality, and most recently, trying to convince Americans he didn’t sit idly by while a Russian military intelligence unit placed bounties on the heads of U.S. troops.
He’s failing miserably on all fronts. COVID-19 is infecting Americans at remarkable rates (this week the state of Florida recorded 10,000 cases in a single day); meanwhile Trump has continued to hold rallies indoors and decline to wear a mask in public, despite his recent admission that he thinks he looks good in one.
As far as the protests go, the U.S. president appears to care more about the fate of toppled statues than actual human beings. (He recently called the “Black Lives Matter” slogan a “symbol of hate.”) And concerning the recent revelation that Russia may have paid members of the Taliban to kill U.S. troops, it’s not especially surprising that he claims the story is a hoax perpetrated by the media.
What is surprising, however, is public reaction to his recent behaviour. There was a time, not long ago, when scandals and gaffes like these seemed to bounce off of him, when the president could lie incessantly about whatever he wanted, when he could be as crude as he wanted and many Americans would shrug their shoulders. That time may be over.
This week, the U.S. president’s approval rating fell to its lowest point in more than a year (41 per cent). According to a new Pew research poll, only “17 per cent of Americans — including 25 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and 10 per cent of Democrats and Democratic leaners — say they feel proud when thinking about the state of the country.”
Another Pew poll from June suggests “two-thirds of U.S. adults say they support” the Black Lives Matter movement (this may indicate why the president’s antagonizing of protesters didn’t provoke the positive response he had hoped for.)
According to an Ipsos poll from June, 58 per cent of Americans disapprove of the president’s response to the coronavirus. Right now, according to a new national poll in the U.S., Biden is leading Trump by 12 points.
Polls shouldn’t give anyone comfort that Trump will surely lose the 2020 election, just as they shouldn’t have given anyone comfort Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. Pollsters are not fortune-tellers.
But 2020 is so far a uniquely, almost unbelievably bad year. It’s possible that in such a year, Trump’s “Teflon” is decaying; that some Americans who were previously amused by or ambivalent about his tactics are fed up. It’s hard for a leader to spin civil unrest, mass infectious disease, and the alleged unchecked murder of troops to his advantage. It’s hard, in other words, to spin straight up chaos.
In 2016, Trump asked voters to give him the platform to Make America Great Again. In 2020, he is asking for the privilege to “Keep great” a nation that is, according to recent polling, overwhelmingly ashamed of itself.
He is not made of Teflon. He’s a human being and a good salesman.
However, he may discover come November that people are no longer buying what he’s selling.