Virus shows Trump values attention over authority

For the last four years two Western political figures have loomed particularly large in the imaginations of anxious liberals. The first is Donald Trump, notionally the West’s most powerful populist simply by virtue of the office he occupies. The second is Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, probably the West’s most effective populist in terms of the powers he’s consolidated, the opponents he’s routed and the influence he’s claimed over his nation’s political life.

There are good reasons to consider Trump and Orban as parallel figures. They have similar political bases, similar enemies and similar support from the “nationalist international” that has rallied online support for populists the world over. Both are sharp critics of international institutions and liberal politesse.

But there has always been an essential difference between the men, palpable from the first days of Trump’s administration but thrown into sharp relief by the crisis of the last few months.

In Hungary, the pandemic’s arrival prompted a swift push for a declaration of emergency, passed by a supermajority in Hungary’s Parliament, that gave the prime minister extraordinary powers for the duration of the crisis — and left that duration open-ended, a state of exception without a formal end.

Orban’s critics charged that Hungary had crossed the Rubicon into dictatorship. But one could easily recognize he was behaving the way aggressive leaders generally behave in times of crisis — seeking more authority, more space to act.

COVID-19 afforded roughly the same opportunity to Trump: Here was a foreign threat that required a robust response, a danger that arguably vindicated certain nationalist and populist ideas, a situation in which the normal rules of politics could be suspended for public safety’s sake.

For good or ill, in the past such crises have generally led to surges of presidential popularity and consolidations of presidential power.

But Trump didn’t want the gift. It’s not just that our president was too ineffective to consolidate power, that any potential authoritarianism was undermined by his administration’s incompetence.

Incompetent he surely is, but in areas that involve his self-preservation he still finds a way to wield his powers even when norms stand in his way.

But Trump clearly lacks both the facility and the interest level required to find opportunity in crisis. In this case, confronted with the same basic facts as Orban, he showed no sense of the pandemic as anything save an inconvenience to be ignored, a problem to be wished away, an impediment to his lifestyle of golf and tweets. And when reality made ignoring it impossible, his only genuinely political impulse — the only impulse that related to real power and its uses — was to push the crucial forms of responsibility down a level, to governors, and wash his presidential hands.

In this the coronavirus has clarified, once and for all, the distinctiveness of Trump’s demagogy. Great men and bad men alike seek attention as a means of getting power, but our president is interested in power only as a means of getting attention. So while his critics and his allies imagined him, in different ways, as an American Orban, the great crisis of his presidency has revealed the vast gulf that separates him not only from Hungary’s leader but from almost every statesman ever considered uniquely dangerous or uniquely skilled.