Here’s something we all have in common with President Trump, aside from an inexplicable fascination with Kanye West: Like Trump, Americans tend to look for an easy foil when facing adversity, some irredeemable character who stands in the way of our hard-won freedom and prosperity. We like to put a face to the danger.
Which is why, in the absence of a clear villain during a global pandemic, the public has begun to fix its frustration on the only logical culprit it can pick out of a lineup.
That would be Trump himself.
According to the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of Americans think Trump reacted too slowly to the coronavirus threat. More than 7 in 10 say the worst of this crisis is yet to come.
The latest Gallup tracking poll tells us that Trump’s uptick in popularity last month, during his first week or so of hosting the daily variety show that his aides like to call a briefing, has disappeared. Trump’s cherished approval rating has fallen six points since mid-March, to about 43 percent — the worst slide of his presidency.
A week’s polls amount to a small sample, but if you’re Trump, this is a more worrisome trend than the usual peaks and valleys in public sentiment. This is Jimmy Carter kind of worrisome. This is like that nightmare where you look in the mirror and somehow George H.W. Bush is staring back at you.
Because unless everybody who ever won a Nobel Prize for anything is wrong (and I’d never discount the possibility), the road back to physical and economic health extends through the summer and probably beyond — assuming we don’t rush the process and ignite another outbreak.
And if popular consensus holds that you’re the one to blame, then good luck trying to run for reelection on anything else.
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We’re not always a vengeful people, Americans. In happier times, we don’t go around looking for enemies to parade through the public square. You can do pretty much whatever evil you want in the world, and as long as it doesn’t interrupt stock markets or the Super Bowl, we’re as likely as not to look the other way.
But in times of existential crisis, we do have a certain blood lust, and our politicians are generally inclined to satisfy it. Ayatollahs and desert strongmen, communist sleeper cells and urban “super-predators” — we can be counted on to find someone who personifies the threat and whose downfall, we imagine, will cause the immediate peril to pass.
We’re a country, don’t forget, that once invaded Panama with loud rock music and threw its two-bit dictator, Manuel Noriega, into an American prison, in large part because someone had to be punished for the crack epidemic.
The problem with a lethal virus, though, is that there’s no obvious culprit one can attach to it, no half-crazy chieftain somewhere whose public sacrifice would signal justice and a return to normalcy.
Trump’s been searching, mightily, for a suitable nemesis. For weeks now, our entertainer-president has been auditioning various characters for the role of pandemic super-villain, veering from one to the other and back again. He’s tried China. He’s tried the governors. He’s tried, of course, the media.
Want to know what desperation looks like? Trump has even tried inciting a popular rebellion against the World Health Organization (WHO), which most Americans, until this week, probably would have guessed was some kind of texting abbreviation.
OMG crazy WHO! SMH!
Trump is a guy who needs to blame somebody for everything, in good times or in bad. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump famously told reporters in one of his first pandemic briefings. Those words should one day be chiseled into the gaudy marble lobby of the Trump Presidential Library. It’s the family crest.
Except the polling is starting to show that there is no standard-issue bad guy who can take the fall for this calamity.
There’s no Khomeini or bin Laden to point to when the unemployment insurance runs out. You can’t blame homegrown terrorists or even Wall Street bankers for the administration’s confusion and mismanagement, the gaping void where an actual federal response ought to be.
Maybe we come through this sooner than expected, with fewer deaths and an economy that soars “like a rocket ship,” as Trump never tires of saying. But if the crisis drags on, it will inevitably come to define the Trump years, no matter how many diversions he offers up or how much name-calling he does.
You know what we usually end up calling a president who manages to become the face of chaos and dysfunction?
One-termer.
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