Trump saw the pandemic as his own enemy

Chris Reed, Tribune News Service

President Donald Trump’s decision to deny reality and invent vast conspiracies in an effort to avoid conceding his reelection defeat isn’t just both predictable and tiresome. It’s dangerous. President-elect Joe Biden and his incoming administration need access to COVID-19, national security and foreign policy briefings right away. The delay in the 2000 transition, caused by the 36-day fight over whether Texas Gov. George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore won Florida and thus the White House, was linked by the 9-11 Commission to the Bush administration’s failure to prevent the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But maybe the president’s angry, all-cap tweets aren’t just driven by his lifelong inability to ever admit setbacks. Maybe it’s because when he’s lying awake at 3 am, he realises he could readily have been reelected — if only he had taken the coronavirus pandemic more seriously. There was nothing inevitable about his defeat.

According to the media tally, Trump won 232 of the 270 electoral votes he needed for reelection. If he had received 0.3% more of the 15 million-plus ballots cast in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, he could have gotten 279 electoral votes — despite a much bigger national popular vote defeat than in 2016. That’s a shift of about one in 300 voters in those states from Biden to Trump.

Of course Trump could have won those 52,000 votes if he did not make some of the most elemental unforced errors by any president in American history. In March, as the pandemic began prompting lockdowns across the nation, he rejected calls from public health experts in and out of his administration to be a model of good behavior by regularly wearing masks and practicing social distancing. National crises give presidents a chance to build bonds with Americans. No student of history, Trump instead saw the pandemic as his personal enemy — not a nationwide challenge to overcome in unifying fashion. Taking a partisan approach to a national emergency by blasting Democratic governors for heeding health experts remains an astonishingly bad decision.

Trump also made some of the most bizarre gaffes in American history. At an April news conference — after more than a month of downplaying conventional recommendations from public health experts — Trump suggested that coronavirus victims could be cured by shining ultraviolet light inside their bodies or with injections of household disinfectant. For someone with tens of millions of ardent followers to say this during a public health emergency is astounding — and off-putting to potential voters. It was no surprise that Trump and many in the White House ended up as coronavirus patients. Their irresponsible behavior asked for it.

But there are also state-specific reasons to see Trump as his own worst enemy.

In Pennsylvania, nearly 5,000 nursing home residents died during the first five months of the pandemic. Much more federal guidance about best practices at such facilities would have been helpful.

With Georgia, the White House refused to release a report in July from its coronavirus task force saying it was one of at least 18 states that was botching its pandemic response because of basic errors. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, a mask critic, might have listened to this critique if it were issued with any fanfare by a Trump-created task force.

The same report also faulted Arizona, which at one point in June had among the highest per-capita coronavirus infection rates that had ever been seen in the United States or Europe. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, another mask critic, might have gone a different direction if publicly faulted by the White House.

Yes, of course, lockdown critics including Trump have a strong point when they note the huge downside of the economic chaos and mental health stress created by lockdowns forcing millions of people out of work. What happened in America in March and April was far from ideal. Yet there are entire First World nations — New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan — where there is once again a 2019 vibe to work, social life and recreation because their leaders relied on health experts. They locked down but reopened once it became evident that public compliance with edicts on masks and social distancing had sharply reduced the spread of the virus.

Given the apparent efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — whatever the resistance to commonsense safety steps by millions of Americans inspired by Trump — life could be much closer to normal before long. Bring it on. But what probably will never go away is Trump and his supporters insisting, without evidence, that the Nov. 3 election was stolen.

The truth, though, is painful and obvious. The same instincts that Trump relied on in 2015 and 2016 when steamrolling to the Republican nomination and then the presidency went disastrously wrong in 2020. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz could be bullied and then ignored. Not SARS-CoV-2. If Trump grasped this, he would have been America’s fourth straight two-term president.

But he didn’t. And as a result, a painful chapter in US history is now coming to a close.