Having observed and documented the descent of Russia into totalitarian rule under the dead-eyed Vladimir Putin, journalist Masha Gessen’s observations of our Trumpified America are both troubling and invaluable. In a recent piece, she notes how President Trump is reacting to the coronavirus in predictable ways, a repertoire that includes lies, self-praise, threats, and stoking fear. But while she shares the harshest critiques of the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, she warns that the fear and uncertainty that accompany the pandemic may strengthen his authoritarian approach to governance:
[A] pandemic [. . .] exerts terror. Terror is effective when every person in the population has a credible fear of suffering and dying [. . .] [A] population gripped by terror creates extraordinary opportunities for this President, who has been groping his way to autocratic rule.
The biggest gift the pandemic may give Trump is the opportunity to envelop an ever greater number of people in his reality. [. . .] Anxiety is ever the autocrat’s friend. Living in a fog where one either doesn’t know whom to believe or finds fact-based reality terrifying, more and more people may heed the clarion call of the con man-in-chief.
Beyond the anxiety induced by the disease itself, the extreme damage to the economy could, counter-intuitively for many of us, also strengthen the president’s appeal:
Other friends of the autocrat, counterintuitively, are a tanking economy and a scarcity environment. The inability to plan, to have the certainty of being able to feed one’s family today and tomorrow, produces more anxiety and fear of change.
Trump’s failures, by creating instability and fear in the population, might make Americans more receptive to further strongman assertions by the president that he alone is able to help them amid the disorder. This certainly runs against what a lot of people think, who assume his failures will turn voters against Trump. For instance, many think the president will be undone by a cratering economy — and indeed, there is good evidence that the strong economy he has enjoyed during his term has provided a buffer against even worse approval ratings than he already receives. Against this, though, we need to recognize that a broad longing for certainty and order out of a chaotic situation is not just a possible scenario ahead of us, but is an apt descriptor for how many Trump supporters saw their situation in the United States when they made the fateful decision to vote for this awful man. Millions of white Americans saw the demography of the country changing and perceived their status in the country to be slipping away, which was sufficiently disturbing to them that an explicit racist with anti-democratic tendencies was seen as an acceptable, indeed, the logical choice.
A general tendency to underestimate the appeal of the president’s authoritarian politics to date has blinded a lot of Americans to the appeal, as Gessen suggests, that such politics can have in a worsening economy and destabilized social environment. Certainly the Democrats as a whole have been slow to realize that Donald Trump and the Republican Party don’t actually believe in democratic politics anymore, if the basic tenant of democracy is understood to be that the majority should rule. Democrats expect that competence will win out at the end of the day, but they still seem not to see how much appeal there is to a president and party that will make you feel powerful, revenged and restored in a country that no longer seems to place them at the top of the food chain.
The idea that the president might benefit from the coronavirus crisis seemed to receive some slight evidence a week or two ago, when, amazingly, a plurality of voters approved of his handling of the pandemic. But it seems those who suggested these polls might reflect a “rally around the flag” effect in a time of national emergency may have been right, as the latest polling shows those numbers turning against him. This provides some hope that most of us are not buying his bluff and bluster as a way out of this crisis — but I don’t think this necessarily means that he won’t still be able to cement his hold on his base through his usual bag of racist and authoritarian tricks. A huge question for me is how much this crisis might strengthen his appeal, as Gessen warns, or whether it might serve up such a dose of deadly reality as to expose unforgivably the president’s incompetence and indifference to even his base’s suffering. This pandemic would seem to threaten the blood bond between Trump and his white supporters — after all, he was elected to inflict cruelty on minorities, not his own voters.