Trump is losing control of his own propaganda

President Donald Trump is sometimes said to possess an almost mystical level of control over the news cycle and the public narrative, an otherworldly dominance that is usually depicted with well-worn phrases like “Trump is flooding the media zone” or “Trump thrives on chaos” or “Trump’s distractions are working for him.”

But if Trump ever did possess such paranormal powers, the real story of the moment is that he’s losing control of them, and they are now operating against him.

The battle over the rollout of a coronavirus vaccine perfectly captures this emerging dynamic. It’s now becoming a major issue in the presidential race, but not on the terms Trump originally intended.

Trump has now explicitly broken with the head of his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Dr. Robert Redfield — on when a vaccine will be widely available. Redfield had said that even if the vaccine is announced in November or December, it won’t be “fully available” until middle or late 2021.

But then Trump smacked Redfield down, insisting that once a vaccine is announced it will go to the general public “immediately,” and that “under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.”

In saying this, Trump may have thought he was marshaling his reality-bending powers to great effect once again. But it’s actually having the effect of inadvertently upending his own propaganda.

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Trump’s original scheme was a clever one: He would keep claiming a vaccine is right around the corner, and might even arrive before the election — both to pressure the public health bureaucracy into approving it quickly and to persuade the public that widespread vaccine availability is imminent, due to his leadership.

This created great alarm among scientists and regulators in the government, who worried that Trump was laying the groundwork to bulldoze through a vaccine announcement without regard for agreement on its safety and efficacy. They leaked word of their fear.

But Trump had an answer for that problem. When Joe Biden objected, insisting that if a vaccine is announced we should trust the scientists and not Trump on whether it has been adequately vetted, Trump offered the deviously clever rejoinder that his Democratic opponent was the one sowing doubts about science and vaccines for political reasons.

Presto! Biden is now the antivaxxer, and Trump is the one aligned with the scientists! Trump’s magical manipulation of the public narrative worked once again!

But Trump has now destroyed that storyline. By publicly breaking with Redfield over the timing of the vaccine, Trump defined the debate as one in which the public must choose: Either believe Trump, or believe the scientists.

This has made it far less likely that Trump will profit off of media coverage that, either through incompetence or wilful both-sidesism, confused Biden’s insistence that we can’t trust Trump with a claim that we can’t trust vaccines and science, and equated that with Trump’s pressure for a vaccine by election day: Both sides are politicizing the vaccine process!

But Trump has clarified the choice: Biden is on the side of science, against Trump.

A case in point is a terrific

Sept. 16 New York Times piece by Sydney Ember. Just before Trump broke with Redfield, Biden had declared that the American people should “trust vaccines” and “trust scientists” but that they should not “trust Donald Trump.”

As the Times piece notes, Trump’s slapdown of Redfield “seemed to lend credence” to Biden’s claim. It also pointed out that when Trump accused Biden of promoting anti-vaccine theories, he was being “misleading.”

In other words, Trump proved Biden right. It will be harder and harder for news coverage to avoid making this clear to readers. That’s due to Trump’s hamhanded undermining of his own propaganda.

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Trump’s public break with Redfield also points to another way that Trump is losing control of his own propaganda. It serves as a particularly stark reminder that Trump is corruptly reducing hugely consequential government undertakings to matters that only serve his political interests.

We’ve seen this on many fronts: Top political appointees are interfering with CDC public health messaging to bolster Trump’s rosy coronavirus claims. Senior Homeland Security officials appear to be twisting intelligence to support Trump’s campaign agitprop.

Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr is working to undermine his own department’s conclusions about Russian interference in 2016, to facilitate another round for Trump. And Barr is bolstering Trump’s lies about vote-by-mail to give him cover to declare countless ballots against him as invalid.

All of those, too, constitute efforts to use the government to manufacture self-serving propaganda similar to Trump’s efforts on the vaccine. But, taken together, they’ve only reinforced the impression that Trump is corruptly using the government to, well, manufacture self-serving propaganda.

The White House is now announcing that it’s aiming for 100 million doses of vaccine by October, with another 300 million available by January.

The obvious game plan here is to create the impression that a solution is right around the corner, due to Trump’s stupendous leadership, even if it ends up not materializing, and rely on credulous media to amplify the message in the runup to the election.

But why would the public believe anything the White House says about this?