When Donald Trump became the GOP presidential nominee in 2016, people searched for a way to express the kind of catastrophe that could result from electing such a person to the most powerful job in the world. “What if he starts World War III because somebody sent him a mean tweet?” some said, or more simply, “We’re all gonna die.”
Though he still has some time left to immolate all humanity in a nuclear conflagration, that doesn’t seem too likely. Instead, what’s happening right now with the coronavirus pandemic is the thing we should have been worried about. This is the crisis Trump was least prepared to manage.
As we watch it play out, we’re witnessing how all of Trump’s character flaws, pathologies and managerial weaknesses are coming together to make the novel coronavirus — and the looming threat of an economic downturn — impossibly worse:
Trump’s White House is a mess. In any crisis, you want an organization that runs smoothly and communicates well internally. But the word used most often to characterize Trump’s White House may be “chaos.” He’s on his fourth chief of staff and sixth communication director. His White House leaks more than any in history, as aides jockey for position or distance themselves from screw-ups. Trump himself admits that he likes to set staff against one another, as though operating the government were like an episode of “The Apprentice.” “I like conflict,” he says. “I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go.”
Trump values loyalty over competence. “I expect loyalty,” Trump reportedly told then-FBI Director James B. Comey not long before firing him. We’ve seen it again and again: Officials who put the interests of the country or the requirements of their job over personal service to Trump, like Jeff Sessions, earn his ire and are eventually shown the door, while fervent devotees are rewarded. The Post reports that he has tasked a close aide with assembling a list of insufficiently loyal officials so they can be purged. And one of the first things he did in office was to hire his daughter and son-in-law for top positions.
Needless to say, that doesn’t get you a government of the most skilled and experienced people who can handle a crisis when it comes. It gets you a collection of yes men, many of whom won’t be able to do the job that’s demanded of them.
So Trump’s televised address on the crisis was written by Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, without the input of public health experts. Not surprisingly, it was full of factual errors and reassured no one.
Trump distrusts expertise and experts. One of the running themes of Trump’s presidency — and his whole life — is that people with education, training and experience are idiots who know nothing, and that he knows more than them about the area of their expertise. He says this constantly.
On a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he said, “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” So when an expert tells him something he doesn’t want to hear, he’s ready to just decide it’s not true, because he’s the ultimate authority on everything.
Trump can’t tell the truth, and must always say everything is great. From the beginning of the crisis, Trump insisted everything was under control, his administration was doing a spectacular job, and it would all be over soon. When he announced his task force, he claimed that “we’ve had tremendous success,” there were only 15 people infected, and that “within a couple of days” that would be "close to zero.”
Even if Trump were not already the most dishonest politician in American history, this kind of thing would have destroyed his credibility. So at moments when the public needs to trust that our government will not lie to us, Trump has no ability to reassure us or prepare us for what we have to do.
Trump’s relentless need to attack his opponents renders him unable to unify the country. At a moment when a president ought to be calling the country to common purpose, Trump is spending his days insulting Democrats on Twitter and blaming his own shortcomings on Barack Obama.
That’s hardly all. We could discuss Trump’s inability to plan for the future and lack of concern for any problem that isn’t staring him in the face. (In 2018, he disbanded the White House team responsible for preparing for pandemics.)
We could talk about his penchant for conspiracy theorizing, which is not unrelated to the fact that he prefers to get information from Fox News rather than from government officials.
We could go into his relentless and pathetic need for compliments and affirmation. Whenever one of his political appointees goes on TV to discuss the crisis, every other sentence they utter is a tribute to his magnificent leadership, because they know their jobs depend on enthusiastic lickspittlery.
Or we could consider that his top priority is never what’s happening to the country but instead how it’s making him look, which has led him all along to downplay the severity of the pandemic.
But what it adds up to is that we’ve never seen a president less equipped to handle a crisis on this order, or more likely to turn it into a cataclysm.
I began by noting that when Trump was running for president in 2016, many warned inaccurately that if he was elected, he might start a nuclear war. There was another group, perhaps even larger, who said, “Sure, he’s kind of a joke, but why not give him a shot? What’s the worst that could happen?” Now we’re finding out.
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