The acid test of Trump's maverick leadership has come – can he save himself?
With his back to the wall, Donald Trump turned to perhaps the only people that truly impress him: not health experts or scientists but the titans of corporate America.
Confronted by a global pandemic he cannot bully, insult or out-tweet, the president paraded chief executives at the White House in the hope they could dig him out of a hole partly of his own making.
Retailers such as CVS, Target, Walmart and Walgreens – household names in America – will provide “drive-thru” testing for the coronavirus, Trump promised, while Google was developing a national website to offer guidance.
This, however, came as a surprise to Google. The tech giant denied it is doing any such thing.
The bizarrely misleading claim was indicative of Trump’s mishandling of a crisis different in magnitude from any he faced before. The former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment did not send markets into free fall, force mass closures of schools and sporting events or potentially put millions of lives at risk.
The acid test of Trump’s maverick leadership has finally come.
His response so far has been “haphazard”, said Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “When you start from the point of thinking the whole thing is a hoax, or at least something your political opponents are ginning up to use against you, it colours your whole approach.”
Trump’s original sin was committed two years ago when he disbanded a White House office dealing specifically with preparation for pandemics. His discomfort on this topic was clear on Friday when a reporter asked him about it.
“Well, I just think it’s a nasty question,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it.”
Trump’s second big mistake was turning down the offer of a Germanmade diagnostic test approved by the World Health Organization (WHO). Asked about the shortage, which left America lagging far behind South Korea and other countries, Trump said: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
The past few weeks have also brought a cascade of false statements that sought to downplay the severity of the threat and wish it away. The coronavirus is not as bad as the seasonal flu, Trump has maintained, and will disappear in the warmth of spring. The slump of financial markets, on which Trump has yoked so much of his reelection hopes, finally seized his attention.
Everything he did, however, just seemed to make matters worse. He toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta wearing a “Keep America Great Again” cap, boasting of his “natural ability” to understand the subject and making the bogus assertion that any American who needs a coronavirus test can get one.
On Wednesday this week he addressed the nation from the Oval Office, live on primetime TV. It was, in many viewers’ estimation, an unmitigated disaster, fueling anxiety rather than calm, panic rather than reassurance. Trump blindsided European officials by announcing a 30-day travel ban and made some basic factual errors the White House had to correct.
Then came Friday’s rose garden reset. Trump declared a national emergency that released $50bn for state and local governments. Shaking hands with chief executives despite medical advice on social distancing, the president promised a public-private partnership to finally make testing widely available.
His eternally loyal vice-president, Mike Pence, did his best to reshape the narrative.
“This day should be an inspiration to every American,” he said, “because thanks to your leadership from early on, not only are we bringing a whole-ofgovernment approach to confronting the coronavirus, we’re bringing an allof-America approach.
“Mr President, from early on, you took decisive action. You suspended all travel from China … throughout this process, Mr President, you’ve put the health of America first.”
It was an attempt to right the ship and restore confidence. But will it work?
There was a promising sign on the stock market. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped nearly 2,000 points – its biggest point gain ever.
Furthermore, the are few signs that the coronavirus shambles has disillusioned Trump’s supporters. Some 87% of Republicans approve of his handling of the problem, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.
Sean Spicer, a former White House press secretary, said: “I think they came out really strong in terms of declaring flights shut down [from China]. The rollout of the kits and the testing was a step backwards but now they seem to be getting their footing back.”
Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “He gets mixed reviews. His rhetoric over this has been sloppy if not reckless: the Trump tendency to blurt out things, loose talk. Where he got good reviews lies in the government’s overall approach.”
Whalen noted that
California’s
Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, had praised Trump for supporting his state in the repatriation of passengers from a coronavirus-infected cruise ship.
Newsom told reporters: “We had a private conversation, but [Trump] said: ‘We’re gonna do the right thing’ and ‘You have my support, all of our support, logistically and otherwise’. He said everything I could have hoped for and we had a very long conversation and every single thing he said, they followed through on.”
Trump will almost certainly face Joe Biden in November’s presidential election. Standing before US flags, the former vice-president gave a speech this week about his plan to tackle the coronavirus, presenting the image of a government in waiting.
It made for a telling contrast with Trump, who may find himself haunted by the spectre of George W Bush’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Whalen said: “The question is how does he handle this as on a personal level. For Bush, the problem with Katrina wasn’t the federal response but Bush not getting out of the plane, not showing the personal touch. Nobody elected Trump on the principle that he’d be the hugger-in-chief or the consoler-in-chief.
“The economy is his trump card at all times. There are people who say: ‘I may not care for the tweets or his bombastic bluster but I’m making money while he’s in office.’ But now people will get their monthly statement and ask: ‘What happened to 10% of my portfolio?’”
His rhetoric over this has been sloppy if not reckless: the Trump tendency to blurt out things, loose talk
elites to hunt deplorables becomes a reality because deplorables can’t take a joke about liberal elites hunting deplorables. The slapstick deaths are supposed to indicate that hey, we’re just playing around here, rather than show a callous disregard for human life on the part of the film-makers. And if you don’t find it funny to watch a woman impaled on spikes or a man blown up on a landmine or a woman choking to death after she’s poisoned, you must be one of those humorless cancel culture freaks who need to learn to take a joke.
But of course if you’re from and of the coasts it’s easy to believe these new culture wars are just about a difference of opinion about gun control or abortion and not about the hopelessness and loss of meaning and instability causing the deaths of despair killing white middle Americans without college degrees through suicide and addiction. It’s similar to how one segment of the population will remember the culture wars of the 1990s as a discussion about whether a crucifix of Jesus Christ submerged in urine should be considered art, and not about whether the thousands of gay people, IV drug users, hemophiliacs, and others deemed ultimately disposable by the government and society should have been allowed to die from Aids. Or as a debate about whether children should be exposed to vulgarity in music, and not about whether black people or people in poor neighborhoods should be murdered, brutalized, and harassed by the police forces that claim to protect them.
It’s not clear that anyone involved with this film has ever even been to the south. The star, Betty Gilpin, plays a working-class woman named Crystal who spends the entirety of the film holding her jaw as if she is trying not to let any spit from the chewing tobacco dribble out, and yet at no time does she partake in chewing tobacco. It’s like she saw a picture of someone once and thought, Oh, that must be how they do it down there, but no one explained to her it’s not just that all southerners have a severe underbite. But then no one involved in the production thought it might be weird for the action of the film to play out in Croatia, a country still dealing with the aftermath of its own … uh, let’s call it political polarity and divisiveness, I guess.
I’m sure the millionaires who endorsed billionaire Mike Bloomberg in the Democratic primaries will watch this movie on their private jets and have a good chuckle at the depiction of clueless and out-of-touch elites heading to Croatia on their private plane with a cargo full of white trash. “Oh my God, that’s so us! I also enjoy a little caviar snack while on my way to my private manor in the Balkans.” And then they’ll go back to deciding which underprivileged group should receive their charity this month – instead of just paying their taxes, which could fund an adequate public healthcare system that would keep people from having to beg online to afford chemotherapy.
Cinemas across the US are currently closing because of coronavirus; perhaps only the elites who can afford private screenings of The Hunt in their palatial estates will be able to see it. In the meantime, the rest of us are about to go on quarantine lockdown, forced to sustain ourselves on whatever mediocre bilge Netflix has put out this week. I think that’s a metaphor. For something.
Jessa Crispin is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast. She is a Guardian US columnist
go before the next redistricting.
“We’re just citizens who have been activated. If our majority – our threemillion-person majority – was engaged in state politics, everything is different,” says Rita Bosworth, the cofounder of Sister District, which started with a Facebook conversation and now has 30,000 nationwide volunteers organized through sixty-five active teams on the ground. They focused on thirtytwo legislative elections – and won sixteen of them – in nine states where Democrats might flip a chamber or make inroads into gerrymandered GOP majorities.
Her three co-founders – political director Gabrielle Goldstein, partnerships and engagement director Lala Wu and programs and communication director Lyzz Schwegler – came together largely through a secret Facebook group of liberal lawyers established after the 2016 election. By spring,
Bosworth, Goldstein and Wu had abandoned successful law careers to save democracy full-time.
On election night 2016, tearful in Columbus, Ohio, Flippable’s Catharine Vaughan found herself coming to a similar conclusion. She had taken a leave from McKinsey and Co and left San Francisco to work for the Hillary campaign and spend months on a host family’s sofa. When the campaign ended with whiskey and tears, Vaughan planned to head back to consulting and the Bay Area. Over farewell margaritas, the team tried to unpack what had gone wrong and what might come next. The conversation turned to gerrymandering. Ohio is enough of a competitive, bellwether state that they’d all put their lives on hold, thinking the state’s electoral votes could decide the presidential election. But Republicans still held a two-to-one edge in the state legislature.
Vaughan had spent several years working with the Gates Foundation and others on health problems in east Africa that were completely preventable if the right resources landed in the right places. People in politics are really good at understanding who has power and how to build a web of relationships, Vaughan says, but less skilled at building and judging effective organizations. “How do you help them see that maybe the way they’re giving their money could be optimized?”
Forward Majority’s Hausman had a similar background; as a partner at the global strategy firm Dalberg, where she led the Americas team and the global health practice, she worked on bringing business-school analysis and smartdata analytics to philanthropy. Rural governments in sub-Saharan Africa lacked the money they needed, for example, to buy and deliver bed nets to citizens before the rainy mosquito season. “There are these unsexy barriers that really impact people’s lives,” she tells me. “We can’t fix the whole thing, but we can use business strategy and analytics on specific problems that are fixable.” Turned out, one of those problems was democracy right here at home.
Litman believes Democrats need to compete – and win – everywhere. She’s after candidates rooted in a community who are committed to getting out there and talking to people. She calls it her “fuck yeah” test.
Back on that Washington DC, rooftop, a third US senator and potential Democratic nominee, Elizabeth Warren, slides out of the Run for Something bash before the cornhole battle commences. “This is the future,” she tells me quietly, holding her arms open wide before the room. Indeed, if the forty-sixth president of the United States was pitching beanbags that night (or sneaking out early), it hardly seems a stretch to suggest that the forty-ninth or fiftieth might have been there as well, along with future senators and governors and state representatives, all inspired to run, and shown how to do it, by a new generation of activists who reinvented the party where it had been neglected by their elders – down ballot, where it matters most.
Excerpted from “UNRIGGED: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy“by David Daley. Published by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton. Copyright 2020 David Daley, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.
If our majority – our three-million-person majority – was engaged in state politics, everything is different
staying in the race, and his fervent youth support may be the only thing troubling Biden. Younger people, who already make up a relatively small slice of the electorate, are turning out in lower numbers than in 2016, when Sanders ran Hillary Clinton close, however, and it would take something unprecedented for Sanders to change that in the next few weeks.
If Biden can overcome his young people problem, and perhaps even if he can’t, then he will probably be the Democratic candidate for president. Win the election, and given his frequent visits to Scranton, it is likely the town will experience a visit by a president at some point.
Given his affinity with his hometown, however, it’s likely that even if Biden loses, he will always be welcome in Scranton.
Particularly by one young woman’s mother.