15 March 20
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15 March 20
FOCUS: Masha Gessen | How the Coronavirus Pandemic Fuels Trump's Autocratic Instincts
Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
Gessen writes: "Donald Trump has a limited repertoire. When it comes to governing, he does five things: perform grand gestures, obfuscate and lie, engage in self-praise, stoke fear, and issue threats."
Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
Gessen writes: "Donald Trump has a limited repertoire. When it comes to governing, he does five things: perform grand gestures, obfuscate and lie, engage in self-praise, stoke fear, and issue threats."
The first four of these were on display in the President’s Wednesday-night address on the coronavirus crisis. The grand gesture was his announcement that he is banning travellers coming in from Europe. The obfuscation and lying came when he boasted of “responding with great speed and professionalism” and promised more widespread testing, effective antiviral therapies, and that insurance companies would waive all co-payments for treatments. These pledges blended seamlessly with self-praise, which included calling the American effort “the most aggressive and comprehensive,” claiming to have handled the coronavirus better than European countries have, and assuring his audience that the United States is well prepared. None of this is true. Finally, the fear-mongering came when Trump called COVID-19 a “foreign virus,” pointing the finger at Europe. Remarkably, Trump didn’t take the opportunity to threaten the Democrats or the media, or blame them for the pandemic, but he has before and will surely do so again.
Trump apparently read from a teleprompter on Wednesday night. After weeks of dismissing the threat of a pandemic and of continuing to obsess about his own personal grievances, he finally sounded grave. This was, in other words, one of those times when Trump sounded Presidential to some people, because he didn’t sound entirely deranged. The former Republican governor of Ohio John Kasich, for example, defended Trump on CNN, saying that “he did fine,” in part because the President read from a script. But precisely because Trump was not at his worst—just his ordinary lying and self-aggrandizing self—in the extraordinary situation of a pandemic, what we are witnessing is peak Trump.
Writing in The Atlantic, the conservative commentator David Frum enumerated the things Trump failed to do in his speech. He offered no guidance for local authorities on issues such as public events and school closures. He gave no accounting of what has gone wrong with the federal response so far. He gave no specifics on the government’s plans for helping people who will certainly face extreme financial hardship as a result of the crisis. In other words, the only attribute of political leadership observable on Wednesday was Trump’s ability to read from a teleprompter. Meanwhile, our lack of an actual functioning President has slowed down local responses. Trump’s habit of obfuscating has translated into classifying essential information, which also handicaps the country’s ability to deal with the virus. And, of course, his grand gesture of closing European air travel sent the markets tumbling, exacerbating what will surely be the catastrophic economic consequences of the coronavirus.
The immediate consequences of peak Trumpism in the public sphere are equally predictable and eminently observable: insufficient information, false information, and muddled information about the pandemic. Fox News has largely echoed Trump’s Twitter messaging, downplaying the seriousness of the COVID-19 threat. A different sort of misinformation has spread in the form of letters and social-media posts written by pseudoscientists, including one full of useless advice attributed, falsely, to someone at Stanford. (I have also seen this letter in Russian, attributed to a Russian infectious-diseases doctor.) Then there is the false information spread by Trump himself and seconded by Vice-President Mike Pence, who went on CNN to continue muddying the waters where Trump left off. Finally, there is the muddled information that emerges from pointedly restrained coverage, such as that practiced by the Times, which creates false equivalencies between Trump’s lies and scientific facts. Take this headline: “Trump Suspends Most Travel from Europe to Try to Limit Virus.” That is a close-enough paraphrasing of what Trump said. But does Trump really believe that that is what he is doing? Does the Times believe that he believes it? If not, then why transcribe his statements as fact? (“No one thinks this policy has anything to do with public health,” Gregg Gonsalves, the epidemiologist, Yale professor, and MacArthur Fellow, wrote on Facebook, in all caps.)
The Trumpian response to COVID-19 has been compared to the Soviet government’s response to the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, in 1986. For once, this comparison is not far-fetched. The people most at risk are not getting necessary, potentially life-saving information; the government bears the responsibility for failing to inform people and for actively suppressing information; there is rumor and fear on the one hand and dangerous oblivion on the other. To be sure, Americans in 2020 have vastly more access to information than did Soviet citizens in 1986. But the Trump Administration shares two key features with the Soviet government: utter disregard for human life, and a monomaniacal focus on pleasing its leader, who wishes only to look good and powerful. These are the features of totalitarian leadership. We have long known that Trump has totalitarian instincts, that he would want to establish total control over a mobilized society if only such an option were available to him. Fortunately for us, however weak American institutions have turned out to be, we have been a long way from the possibility of totalitarianism. But the coronavirus has brought us a step closer.
In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt identified a key precondition: “Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible,” she wrote. She was speaking about state terror, which is possible only when a regime is willing to sacrifice millions of its own people. But a pandemic also exerts terror. Terror is effective when every person in the population has a credible fear of suffering and dying. Of course, COVID-19 is not being unleashed by the state under the cover of ideology, and this is a significant distinction. Whatever the worst-case scenario is here, it’s not twentieth-century totalitarianism. But 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. For the past three years, we have lived in a bifurcated America, where part of the population believes whatever Trump says, even when he lies about the weather, and the other part lives in the tension between observable facts and Trump’s lies. Staying sane in this split-screen reality is hard enough without the existential anxiety induced by a pandemic. 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 conman-in-chief.
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. Arendt wrote about the ways in which totalitarian regimes instrumentalize instability while at the same time dangling the promise of stability. No matter what happens, Trump will continue to claim that our economy is the strongest and that we are the best-prepared and best-protected country. His Democratic opponent will surely make more realistic, hence less optimistic, claims, and this may benefit Trump. In any case, the conventional wisdom that a bad economy will undermine Trump’s chances for reëlection may not hold.
So what do we do? We need to do much more than wash our hands and avoid large crowds. We must realize that this pandemic, like any other, is a political problem and a political opportunity. This is a time for talking about how we live together in this country, which is a hard thing for Americans to do. Our culture prizes individual action and privileges individual survival. Journalists and politicians alike default to a news-you-can-use format, telling people what they should do, personally, to keep safe and be responsible citizens: stay home if you are sick, for example. The real question, though, is: How do we handle this as a society, as communities? What are the opportunities for mutual aid and care, even amid calls for social distancing? What is the response that creates, on the other side of this epidemic, not a collection of atomized individuals who survived a plague but a polity whose members helped one another live? The political leaders who can inspire and inform such a conversation—and such a response—are also the ones who can lead us out of Trumpism.
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