The president already had hurt himself politically by flirting with opponents of social distancing.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
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he narrative is too simple to resist. In rambling remarks, Trump seemed to suggest using light and disinfectants inside the body to kill the coronavirus. His more uncharitable critics said Trump had suggested that Americans drink bleach. Trump responded that he was being sarcastic. Bleachgate, because it is such a great hook, risks symbolizing and distorting the causes of Trump’s relatively weak coronavirus bounce and the timing of that bounce’s fade. It didn’t start with drinking bleach.
The timing just doesn’t work out. Crises tend to produce rally-round-the-flag effects in which a national leader’s popularity improves as the public, in desperation and fear, puts its trust in him or her. That happened for Trump, too, but his initial polling bounce was smaller than for most other comparable national leaders. Relatively few Americans decided they wanted to rally around Trump.
And even that small bounce had largely dissipated by the time Bleachgate broke on April 23. Trump’s Real Clear Politics job approval average was 45.5 percent on February 7. By April 22, it was 45.8 percent. Using the FiveThirtyEight poll tracker, Trump’s job approval was 43.8 percent on February 7 and 43.6 percent on April 22. Whatever bounce Trump had gotten, it was dead and buried before Bleachgate.
Bleachgate broke almost simultaneously with polling showing that Trump and Senate Republicans were faring poorly in swing states. Bleachgate, combined with the bad poll numbers, terrified Republican operatives, but Bleachgate could not have caused the bad poll numbers.
What caused Trump’s rally-round-the-flag effect to be so feeble and transient? Why has Trump’s party lost ground in Senate polling? The timing doesn’t fit Bleachgate. An explanation that better fits the timing is that Trump’s flirtations with the diehard opponents of social distancing limited the upside of his bounce as he both associated himself with an overwhelmingly unpopular cause and appeared irresolute at a time when the public wanted steadiness.
The Extremists
From the middle of March onward, state governors closed down businesses and restricted public gatherings in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus. From the beginning, there were those who opposed those mandated closings.
Within the media, Glenn Beck argued that even though the disease predominately killed the old, the elderly should be willing to go out and risk their lives for the health of the economy and America. Dennis Prager mocked the use of war metaphors in mobilizing against the virus, noting that in a war, people die and that an unwillingness to take risks was “cowardice.” He didn’t note that, in a war, one usually doesn’t mobilize to kill one’s own people, and that there are already many people taking many risks, even as tens of thousands of his countrymen are being killed by the disease.
Other opponents of the lockdown were more oblique. The economists Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer, along with former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, issued a four-point plan to deal with the economic consequences of the coronavirus. The third point was: “Don’t expand welfare and other income redistribution benefits like paid leave and unemployment benefits that will inhibit growth and discourage work.”
The diabolical genius of this policy was that it would have made the state lockdowns untenable by making it impossible for workers who were locked out of their jobs to survive. Presumably someone who was not a sociopath pointed out that Moore, Laffer, and Forbes weren’t fooling anybody and, the next day, the four-point plan became a three-point plan. But the Internet remembers.
On the political side, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas went on television to argue against the lockdowns: “And those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.” Texas congressman Chip Roy decried the cost of the lockdowns and argued that President Trump was listening too much to health experts and should include “economists, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists and primary care doctors” on his coronavirus task force.
That was a reasonable point, though economists overwhelmingly favored the lockdowns. So did most people. One thing to keep in mind is that these were opponents and critics of the lockdowns at the earliest stage. The disease was still expanding exponentially. Testing was entirely inadequate. Absent sufficient testing, contact-tracing was impossible. There was no treatment. Personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves had disappeared from shelves.
These critics, arguing for abandoning social distancing at a time when workers and the elderly were the most vulnerable, were out of step with public opinion. A Fox News poll taken April 4–7 found that 80 percent of respondents favored a national stay-in-place order for nonessential workers (a much more rigid policy than the state-by-state lockdowns that were then in effect). A Huffington Post/YouGov poll taken slightly later found that only 15 percent of respondents thought the lockdown restrictions were too strict. A USA Today poll found a slightly different margin, with only 69 percent favoring a nationwide stay-at-home order for nonessential workers. What bears repeating is that over two-thirds of the public favored a more restrictive approach than the status quo.
But while lockdown opponents were marginal among the American people, they were overrepresented among old-time conservative economists, Republican donors, and especially right-wing talk-show hosts. They would also find a sympathetic ear in the White House.
The Wobble
On March 22, Steve Hilton, a Fox News weekend talk-show host and, at that moment, an opponent of the lockdowns (he would soon change his mind), described the situation thus: “You know that famous phrase ‘The cure is worse than the disease’? That is exactly the territory we’re hurtling towards.”
Within a few hours, Trump would adapt Hilton’s “cure is worse than the disease” to “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem.” Trump also began using talking points from anti-lockdown activists in comparing the coronavirus to the flu and car accidents. Trump also suggested that his administration would reexamine his recommendations on social distancing within 15 days.
Trump also said a lot of other things. His language was vague and open-ended. He didn’t promise to end the lockdowns. He didn’t even assert that he had the power to end the lockdowns (yet), but just as the lockdowns were starting, and as those lockdowns had overwhelming public support, Trump publicly wobbled on the policy, and he furthermore did it in a weasely manner as he tilted in the direction of the lockdown opponents without committing to a change. This wouldn’t be the last time Trump would triangulate between lockdown opponents and supporters.
When anti-lockdown protests sprang up around the country, Trump tweeted “Liberate” while naming states that had Democratic governors. True to his style of signaling support for lockdown opponents while not committing to their position, Trump left himself deniability, but it was also obvious what was happening. He was also setting himself up for another political fail.
The same polls that showed the public overwhelmingly supported the lockdowns also showed that the public trusted their state governments more than they trusted Trump. Even Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, whose capricious restrictions on shopping had brought down her approval ratings, still had the approval of 57 percent of her state.
Furthermore, the anti-lockdown protests had the support of 22 percent of the public and were opposed by 60 percent. While the protesters did everything they could to appeal to conservatives with their Trump signs and MAGA hats, more Republicans opposed the protests than supported them. Trump had pulled off the trick of attacking people who were more popular than him on behalf of protesters who were less popular than him.
And that leaves Trump’s infamous “authority is total” comment, wherein he claimed the authority to force state governors to reopen their states even if they didn’t want to do so. This not only made him look constitutionally illiterate but created a poisonous dynamic. His claim of authority made sense only as a threat to reopen states over the objections of their governors. The problem was that the governors were more trusted than Trump, the lockdowns were still popular, and Trump looked impotent and erratic because his words weren’t backed by action. It was a lose-lose-lose situation of his own creation.
By Comparison
One way to judge Trump is to look at how he compares with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both are controversial, polarizing leaders, and Netanyahu has the additional disadvantage of being under indictment, but his party gained in the polls as a result of his handling of the coronavirus, while the Republicans languish.
Perhaps an even better comparison would be with New York governor Andrew Cuomo and United Kingdom prime minister Boris Johnson. Johnson’s initial response to the coronavirus was a fiasco, as his government first tried to adopt a “herd immunity” strategy of keeping much of business open and then going to a lockdown after the virus was already raging through the country. Cuomo had the bad luck of presiding over a state that was seeded early by the coronavirus, but he was also slower to act than the governor of Washington — another state that was hit early. The result was that the infection spread much more widely in New York.
Trump’s performance has been mixed, but he was early in limiting travel from China (where the disease had originated). Trump drew criticism for this choice, but this policy was praised by the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, for limiting the seeding of the virus before the governors’ ordering lockdowns in the middle of March. (Trump’s liberal critics love to defer to experts right up until those experts say Trump did something right.)
The practical results of these policies was that, as of April 30, New York State had a coronavirus death rate of 1,120 deaths per million, the United Kingdom had a death rate of 392 per million, and the United States overall had a death rate of 186 per million (disproportionately in New York). The political result was that both Boris Johnson and Andrew Cuomo saw far larger and more lasting improvements in their job-approval ratings than did Trump, despite doing an objectively worse job of protecting their constituents.
Consequences
Trump’s flirtations with an unpopular cause limited the rally-round-the-flag effect that might have benefited him. It was a cause that was opposed by virtually all independents and even most Republicans. The political consequences (not to say the policy consequences) would have been far greater if he had outright embraced that cause, but it was enough to poison what could have been a reservoir of goodwill. Other national (and state) leaders showed themselves to be steady and resolute (even when they came to this steadiness and resolution far too late). Trump made himself appear scheming, confused, flighty, and selfish even when he (eventually) settled on the correct course.
A few words should also be reserved for the Arthur Laffers, Stephen Moores, Dan Patricks, and Glenn Becks who opposed the early lockdowns at whatever cost to those who died from the infections.
This coronavirus disproportionately kills men and the elderly. The conservative electorate is disproportionately older and male.
There was always going to be tension within a coalition that was invested in a pro-business, rugged-individualist ideology while depending on the support of Social Security recipients, but the coronavirus revealed that a segment of the center-right’s intellectuals, politicians, and media stars were ready to sacrifice their own voters and viewers. Laffer, Moore, Forbes, Patrick, and the other believers in this toxic variant of pro-business ideology replaced supply-side economics with Ivan Drago economics: If he dies, he dies.
Politically and morally, that makes as much sense as . . . well . . . drinking bleach.