The emerging right-wing virus denial could backfire badly on Republicans

On Tuesday, the U.S. government’s top experts warned that COVID-19 was by no means under control and that premature easing of social distancing could have disastrous consequences. As far as I can tell, their view is shared by almost all epidemiologists.

But they were shouting into the wind. Clearly, the Trump administration and its allies have already decided that we’re going to reopen the economy, never mind what experts say. And if this leads to a new surge in deaths, the response won’t be to reconsider the policy, it will be to deny the facts.

Virus trutherism — insisting that COVID-19 deaths are exaggerated — is already widespread on the right. We can expect to see much more of it in the months ahead.

This turn of events shouldn’t surprise us. The U.S. right long ago rejected evidencebased policy in favor of policybased evidence — denying facts that might get in the way of a predetermined agenda. Fourteen years ago Stephen Colbert famously quipped that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

However, the right’s determination to ignore the epidemiologists is more politically reckless than previous denials of reality.

The emerging right-wing approach to this pandemic echoes the Republican Party’s longstanding approach to climate change: It’s not happening, it’s a hoax perpetrated by liberal scientists, and besides, doing anything about it would destroy the economy.

Indeed, recent anti-lockdown demonstrations appear to have been organized in part by the same people that have have long denied climate change.

During the Obama years, inflation truthers insisted the government was hiding the truth about rampant inflation; unemployment truthers, including a guy named Donald Trump, insisted that the steadily improving job numbers were fake.

But making false claims about the Obama economy didn’t have a political price.

Virus denial, by contrast, could backfire badly on Republicans in a matter of months.

In fact, in some ways that’s already happened. Thanks to the rally-around-the-flag effect, many world leaders saw their approval ratings soar as the seriousness of the COVID-19 crisis became apparent. U.S. governors who have taken tough measures to control the pandemic have very high approval ratings; those who minimized the threat and are pushing to reopen fare much worse.

Now, imagine the blowback — especially among senior citizens — if restarting the economy leads to a new wave of infections.

So why are Trump and company going this route?

We know that Trump is obsessed with the stock market, and his long refusal to take COVID-19 seriously reportedly had a lot to do with his belief that doing otherwise would hurt stock prices. He may now believe that pretending that the crisis is over will boost stocks and that’s all that matters.

Republicans may also believe that the gun-waving, red-hatted anti-social distancing demonstrators represent the “real America.” Polls suggest that they’re a small minority, but the GOP may consider such polls fake news.

I think, however, that there’s another possible reason: Republicans in general and Trump in particular suffer from a sense of inadequacy.

When officials confront an unexpected crisis, they’re supposed to bring in the experts, and devise and implement an effective response. That’s how the Obama administration responded to Ebola in 2014.

But the GOP doesn’t like experts, and it doesn’t have policy ideas beyond tax cuts and deregulation. So it doesn’t know how to respond to crises that don’t fit those ideas. Trump can do policy theater but has no idea how to do it for real.

And at some level he may know that.

Given this sense of inadequacy, it was foreordained that Trump and his allies, after briefly seeming to take COVID-19 seriously, would resume insisting that everything is fine. And they may, for a while, even convince some voters. But the coronavirus, which doesn’t care about political spin, will have the last word.