Coronavirus crisis raises the stakes for Trump’s presidency

WASHINGTON — While the requirement for social distancing has put the brakes on the presidential campaign and all the usual hoopla surrounding it, it also has elevated the question of Donald Trump’s fitness to remain in the Oval Office for a second term.

His initial assurances that the coronavirus was no worse than the flu, and subsequently that the crisis would pass by Easter, all were brushed away by eminent medical experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Experts like Fauci all continue striving to maintain a positive working arrangement with the president, despite their glaring differences of opinion regarding the peril of the pandemic and what it will take to overcome it. Meanwhile, Trump increasingly seeks to convert his now daily White House news conferences into forums spotlighting praise from various sycophants and supplicants for federal largesse.

The result is a sort of rhetorical competition between the president and governors, most notably Democrat Andrew Cuomo of New York, who offers daily reports to New Yorkers on the state of the crisis in his bailiwick. Cuomo’s candid assessments, in the down-to-earth vernacular of the sidewalks of the five city boroughs, has made him an overnight luminary on network and cable television, no doubt to Trump’s irritation.

Cuomo’s recurrent appeals to the federal government for 30,000 to 40,000 needed ventilators for critical care have been rebuked with Trump mockery. He suggested erroneously at one point that Cuomo had thousands available somewhere in New Jersey available to him and unused. At the same time, calls have been raised among some Democrats for the governor to be drafted for the party’s presidential nominee, which he has disavowed, at least for 2020.

Complaints against Trump on grounds of incompetence and malfeasance have been commonplace from Democrats since the start of his presidency. They are based on his lack of executive experience in government or simply his ignorance or disregard of basic tenets of public service and responsibility toward his fellow Americans. His apparent incomprehension of the limits on his own power in office confounds many Republicans as well, although they remain silent.

In this sense, the coronavirus crisis has brought to light the particular peril of having as president an ill-informed man driven by narcissism, whim or just plain limited awareness of the complexities of his office. The medical and health crisis that has stricken the nation on his watch has brought home in an unprecedented fashion the imperative of having s national leader in place of extraordinary wisdom as well as empathy and a clear sense of mission.

Instead, Donald Trump is transparently driven by self-interest and conceit, devoid of any national purpose beyond his vapid slogan to “Make America Great Again.” Fortunately, although our electoral process is temporarily stalled by the necessary group precautions imposed by the coronavirus calamity, it somehow will be reinstated in some dependable nature such as voting by mail by November, enabling the nation’s voters to provide the necessary remedy at the polls or via the mailbox if they choose to use it.

The president’s likely opponent in November, former vice president Joe Biden, sidelined as he is by the demands for social isolation imposed by the crisis, now has ample time to reflect on how best to build his case against the incumbent. If he so decides, he can point to the confusion Trump has brewed over from the start over the virus.

But, strategically, Biden might better lay out how he would have handled it himself, staying on the high road and leaving Trump to being himself in his accustomed attack mode. At this stage, the voters may have had more than they want of bitter negativism for one political cycle.

Ironically, the latest Real Clear Politics poll on Trump’s public popularity shows a slight increase, possibly from the news that working Americans will be getting federal recovery checks voted by Congress in the wake of the national business shutdown. But that funding comes from the legislative branch, not the president. The same poll gives him only 47.3 percent approval, with a majority of Americans still against him. So the jury is still out on his dreams of a second term.

More recent indications suggest the president may at last have realized the dire consequences of the virus and of the federal tardiness in making an adequate response. His critics as well as his defenders can only hope so, for the sake of all our fellow citizens.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books.