In a great piece over at GQ, Laura Bassett traces the authoritarian tendencies evident in President Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis, which I think are a huge part of this story. There’s been a tendency to view the president’s various lies and blunders around the outbreak as primarily signs of incompetence —but as others have observed, authoritarianism and incompetence often go together. An autocrat who relies on his personal decision-making rather than the advice of advisors or experts is bound to make mistakes, while the instinct to cover up problems from public view and accountability means that they can fester and worsen as time passes.
In the case of Trump and the coronavirus, incompetence alone provides an incomplete framework, as it downplays the president’s deliberate and even methodical attempts to manage and discuss the coronavirus in a way that prioritizes his political needs over those of the public. He’s using the power of his office to spread self-serving propaganda about the success of the effort he’s leading to stop the spread of the virus. We can safely assume that Donald Trump realizes he’s in over his head and truly has no sense about how to handle this epidemic; but by telling a story about his brilliant leadership and an alternate reality in which the coronavirus magically disappears, he’s laying the groundwork for the survival of his power no matter what happens.
What I think a lot of us are slow to grasp is that the impress of an increasingly devastating reality will not result in the president accommodating it in rational ways — for example, by admitting mistakes and making a course correction — but in Trump doubling down on its denial, if not in favor of a blissful vision of hale patriots easily shucking off the virus like townsfolk at a Kansas cornfest, then based on a tale wherein evil Democrats and nasty Mexicans conspired to breach our borders and infect the heartland with the Wuhan nasty. The reason we have good reason to suspect this denialism will happen is because it is already, as the president points to the virus as further justification for a southern wall and slurs Democrats for supposedly supporting open borders.
The big question, of course, is whether this will work to distract enough people from the truth of the president’s failures. The authoritarian aspect of his rule is important because this is what has bonded so many of his supporters to this irredeemable man — he is their leader-savior battling the forces of liberalism and non-whiteness and globalism, and it is not a huge stretch from the story he’s already been telling to now believe that a pandemic is yet another reason to stand by him against America’s enemies.
But is there a point when reality will overwhelm propaganda?
Intriguingly, there may well be. For her article, Bassett talked with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, s scholar of authoritarianism and a history professor at New York University who’s been documenting the president’s autocratic tendencies since his election. Ben-Ghiat points to the example of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, for whom a cult of personality could not save him from the harsh reality of Allied bombs falling on his country. In the case of the coronavirus, as Bassett points out, we have the quite twisted situation of the president lying to his base about an illness in ways that make it likelier they will get sick and even die from it. She writes:
The great irony here is that Trump’s own supporters may suffer the most from his narcissistic response to this public health emergency. Many will believe him that the virus is “fake news” and take fewer precautions against it than the city-dwellers stocking up on canned goods (or oat milk) and washing their hands to “Free Bird.” His base tends to be older, thus at higher risk of dying from the virus, and live in rural areas, where there are fewer testing resources and less adequate health care in general.
This whole awful situation reminds me of a great (pre-coronavirus) riff by Portland comic Nariko Ott about how our country is one bad bird flu away from having free college for all. What twist of fate and reality have we undergone that a dark, truth-telling joke threatens to become our lived reality, in part at the president’s own hand? It is the blackest of ironies that Donald Trump may be working toward his own defeat in November by actively ensuring that his supporters are winnowed by a virus indifferent to party affiliation or non-belief in its existence — but this scenario also raises urgent questions for Democrats and other opponents of Trump. Between a president who makes it likelier that many thousands of Americans will die by his bad advice and bungled leadership, and a disease whose spread and lethality will be determined in part by many millions of individual Americans taking steps to protect themselves and others, there’s no choice but to fight for the lives of those we disagree with politically — especially when they’re being misinformed by their deranged leader. Against the obscene betrayal of his own loyal followers, the undeniable realities of the virus in combination with a renewed compassion for our fellow Americans may help break the spell this evil man has cast.