Trump suffers covidiocy, but don’t write him off yet
His bizarre ramblings make it easy to join the jamboree of Trump-bashing, but the inconvenient truth is he’s doing a much better job than many other populist leaders right now.
Coronavirus may kill the strangest beast of all — Donald Trump’s re-election prospects. And yet, and yet …
Right now the virus is proving particularly deadly for the prospects of populists and authoritarians. Trump is no authoritarian but he is the world’s No 1 populist.
His fellow populists look pretty messy. Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, makes Trump look a model of dull consistency, a desiccated calculating machine, with his wild and crazy talk. Coronavirus, the Brazilian says, is only “the little flu”. One by one his senior cabinet ministers resign or get the sack as the President opposes his own government’s health regulations.
But local and provincial authorities widely ignore their President. The coronavirus caseload is nonetheless exploding in Brazil. The death rate is still relatively modest.
Trump’s closest political friend internationally, Britain’s Boris Johnson, also leads an ineffective government response. Johnson won immense personal sympathy and respect for the characteristically cheerful, generous way he endured his near-death virus episode.
But Britain has one of the worst COVID-19 death rates in the world. Johnson’s government responded too late and especially didn’t cut down travel from China. It failed to take the warnings seriously in January and February and didn’t increase its stockpiles of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. Nor did it sufficiently increase its intensive care beds.
This led to its worst mistake — sending old folks with the virus out of hospitals and into care homes to free up beds, failing to see how dangerous care homes were for residents and workers.
Every government has made mistakes but Johnson is a classic populist, chairman-of-the-board sort of PM. Not sweating the details can be a strength — setting a clear direction and delegating implementation. But Johnson missed five of his government’s Cobra virus crisis meetings, long before he took ill. This is also a failure of British institutions — not to have alerted the Prime Minister to how serious thing were. But it’s also a failure by Johnson himself.
Like many populists, Johnson had got rid of the Big Beasts from his cabinet. So when he was sick his government lacked figures with gravitas or standing.
The populist style has not worked well in this crisis. Instead, low-key technocratic leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel have flourished. Populists often brilliantly ignore incremental advice from policy bureaucrats. In this crisis, governments that relied heavily on professional public health advisers did best. Public health advisers got some things wrong. But they got more things right.
The crisis hasn’t been that good for authoritarian leaders either. The Russian people are seeing there are intractable realities of the physical universe that their strongman leader cannot bend to his will after all.
Similarly, Beijing’s catastrophic early mishandling of the virus has brought the first serious questioning of Xi Jinping’s authority within the Chinese leadership elite. Maybe one-man rule, snuffing out all independent internal reporting and going out of your way to antagonise everybody in the world, is not all it’s cracked up to be.
But soaring above all this is the brash yet intricate, sometimes tawdry, sometimes epic drama of the Trump presidency and the fate of the American people.
Like Johnson, Trump has a serious case to answer in the way he responded to coronavirus. Early on, he didn’t take it seriously. He did quickly ban direct travel from China, and that was smart and necessary. Not much later he banned direct travel from Europe.
But he made several undeniable mistakes. Early on, he did nothing to ramp up acquisition and production of PPE and testing kits. The US is by a vast distance the richest and most powerful economy in the world. It simply beggars belief that the US could not have swung into early production of PPE and testing kits and indeed ventilators when it looked as though there would be a critical shortage of those.
Nonetheless, Trump did do most of the right things eventually. In a sense he was following a grand American tradition, to do the right thing after you have exhausted all the alternatives.
As well as the hugely important international travel restrictions, Trump set up a taskforce notionally headed by Vice-President Mike Pence but effectively headed by the redoubtable Dr Anthony Fauci. Trump
backed social isolation and even shutdowns. He backed huge stimulus and relief packages.
However, there is one thing Trump has done throughout the crisis that even his most ardent supporters surely cannot defend. He has consistently talked the most bizarre rubbish. First, the virus was a little thing that would one day, quite soon, “just disappear”. Then it could be treated by hydroxychloroquine, when it turned out there were dangerous side effects and the proper tests hadn’t yet been done. Then he opined that disinfectant killed the virus quickly so getting some disinfectant inside the patient might be the way to go, and that sunshine also killed the virus so getting some sunshine in the body might do it. These are remarks so random and bizarre as to defy any proper analysis.
Most recently, Trump seems to have got jealous of Fauci’s popularity and started criticising the good doctor for expressing an opinion, in testimony to the Senate, on the dangers of ending shutdowns too quickly.
Worse, Trump has started to speak against testing. The virus still behaves in many mysterious ways and is clinically baffling at many levels. But one correlation is overwhelming. Every country that has done well in fighting the virus — South Korea, Germany, notably Australia — has done a lot of testing.
It may be as simple as this. If you test a lot you find out who has the virus and you can isolate them while you treat them and stop them from spreading the virus. However, Trump has worked out what quite a lot of authoritarian leaders have discovered — if you test a lot you find a lot of cases. If you don’t test, or test but don’t publish the results honestly, you declare far fewer cases. As Trump is not an authoritarian leader but a fully democratic one, these options are frustratingly not open to him.
Yet for all that, the US performance overall in the virus crisis is by no means the worst. Not only that, Trump’s unique, indeed before him unimaginable, style of leadership involves him constantly talking to the American people yet them consciously not taking everything he says seriously, certainly not literally.
The American people seem to have factored in the idea that some of their President’s national conversation is a kind of bar-room banter. So it’s less harmful than it seems. So far, the US performance in the COVID-19 crisis is not spectacularly good, but it’s certainly not spectacularly bad. It is somewhat like Wagner’s music — not as bad as it sounds.
The best and fairest way to judge public policy is on results. The US has had a shocking 87,000 COVID deaths. Its death rate is a sobering 263 per million of population. The brilliance of Australia’s performance is reflected in our death rate of four per million.
But before we all join in a jamboree of Trump-bashing, we should compare this with the death rates of similarly wealthy European nations. Different nations do measure COVID deaths differently, so international comparisons are not precise, but they are indicative. Consider the death rates per million of population for these European nations: Belgium 769; Spain 584; Italy 519; Britain 495; France 420; Sweden 350.
The best performing of those European nations, Sweden, has a death rate of nearly a third higher than the US; Belgium, Spain and Italy more than twice that of the US; Britain and France nearly twice. And there is no doubt that coronavirus deaths are heavily under-reported in Italy.
The critical thing, for the US and for Trump, is what happens next with the virus in the US. Nearly half of the US states have falling infection rates so some opening up seems justified. But about half do not have falling infection rates, so opening up may be very dangerous.
On the other hand, Sweden itself perversely perhaps shows that even without enforced government restrictions, people once scared by the virus will themselves take significant social-distancing measures.
Moreover, most US states are not opening up completely. Even more important, there is a serious view that the most effective transmitters of the virus, especially in the early days of any infection, are hospitals, doctors’ surgeries and old-age care homes. It may be that if you can make those places much safer you can get the community transmission rate down.
But all this is somewhat speculative. Anyone who tells you they know exactly what will happen, or even exactly what has happened, is talking baloney. Trump’s preference for more opening may not be basically wrong.
A better popular interrogation of the internal US performance is also warranted. The worst death rate per million of population within the US is in New York. Yet the New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, is a pop star with stellar poll ratings.
Here is a genuine problem, not one just made up by Trump supporters. The mainstream media hatred of Trump is so extreme that it truly distorts their grasp of reality. New York has a bigger population and vastly more money than most nations in the world. Yet it too was slow to recognise and act on the crisis. It decided as policy to send COVID-positive people into old-age care homes. It did not begin to seriously clean its notoriously filthy and claustrophobic subway network until earlier this month.
Yet somehow, through some miraculous political alchemy, Cuomo has been able to blame all of New York’s deaths on Trump and an alleged lack of federal money. Cuomo runs his mouth in a way that the liberal media loves. But really the results he has produced are very poor. Florida, which has more people than New York, has a death rate per million of just 87. There are many reasons for this but one key policy difference was the way Florida protected its old folks’ homes.
Where does this leave Trump versus Joe Biden in November? Trump’s approval rating of 46 per cent is roughly where it always is. The virus has so far been very kind to Biden. He leads the national polls by a few points and key battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida — by a touch more.
But Biden is an exceptionally weak candidate. The virus led to a flight to safety in the Democratic primaries that changed the dynamic and allowed Biden to beat Bernie Sanders. Being hidden away in his basement is the best place for Biden. He is like Gerald Ford; the less he is seen, the better his poll numbers.
But eventually he’ll have to come out and fight Trump hand to hand. The presidential contest, six months out, looks extremely tight.
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