Donald Trump’s Oval Office address on coronavirus was terrifying because it revealed a man completely unmatched to the moment. Even though he was reading from a teleprompter, the president got the details of his major policy announcements wrong. He attempted no emotional connection with or comfort of the tens of millions of Americans whose lives are being upended by the threat of the disease. He didn’t even have anything useful to say about what his own top scientist has described as America’s “failing” testing regime, which has screened about as many people all year as South Korea does in a day. In a presidency accustomed to lows, this one was quite literally sickening.
Trump had an unusual deer-in-the-headlights quality during his address, seeming to reveal that even he realizes his lie-and-deny operation cannot last for much longer. His allies in the media are busy trying to downplay the virus, but anyone who switches over to a real news channel can see what is happening in Italy, where doctors feel forced to leave the elderly to die and hospitals are struggling to bury the dead. With estimates of the number of Americans who might require intensive care running into the millions and only about 45,000 ICU beds available in the US, similar scenes might soon be playing out at home.
When Trump and his allies can no longer lie or deny, we can expect them to move on to the next phase of their crisis management playbook: attacking their enemies. It is already clear that they intend to interpret the virus not primarily as an existential threat to millions of Americans, but as an existential threat to their own political power. With the markets tumbling and Trump’s re-election suddenly in doubt, it is only a matter of time before the right goes on the offensive. When they do, it won’t be the virus in their sights, but the familiar foes: journalists, experts, blue states, immigrants and people of color.
At this point, the coronavirus pandemic will intersect with Trump’s authoritarian impulses in truly frightening ways. With parts of the country experiencing levels of privation and death rarely seen in peacetime, Trump will feel justified in invoking emergency powers. In a declared state of emergency, the president has extraordinary powers, including the ability to freeze an American’s finances and deprive them of the ability to legally work, to control digital communications, and to deploy the military domestically. Aside from these enumerated items, Trump has repeatedly shown that he anyway believes that there are no legal or constitutional limits on presidential authority.
Most worrying of all are the implications for immigrant communities and people of color. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he has a racialized view of who is a “true” American, from denying Barack Obama’s citizenship to telling congresswomen of color born in the US to “go back” to where “they came” from. It would be extraordinary if this doesn’t at the very least color his decisions on where to send federal aid and how to deploy his emergency powers. There is also a disturbing likelihood that Trump will attempt to stoke racism in order to rally his base and present the coronavirus as an alien plot against (white) America.
Already the right has shown a tendency to lash out at foreigners in its response to the virus, from insisting on labeling it “Wuhan coronavirus” to carrying out border closures while doing little to stop transmission within the United States. In a bizarre statement, Senator Tom Cotton even threatened to “hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world”. Once the virus is undeniably established in America, it is all too likely that this animus and psychological need for scapegoats will be directed at those the right considers alien interlopers at home. The results – both from the misuse of state power, and from privately – inflicted terrorism and violence – could be profound.
It is also time to start worrying about the 2020 election. If the economy has crashed, there are countless dead, and Trump is badly trailing in the polls, it is almost inevitable that he will attempt to cast doubt on the wisdom and legitimacy of holding a November election. He would not have to do anything so drastic as to attempt to call off the election – instead, he could call for his supporters to boycott it, then simply refuse to acknowledge the result. If the Republican party faces an electoral wipeout, its craven behavior over the last few years can give us no confidence that the party would defend the democratic process and eject Trump from the White House.
In short, nothing in Trump’s record – or that of his ardent base, whose political support is all he cares about – can lead us to believe that he will use his power to protect and serve all Americans equally in a time of unprecedented crisis. He might look like a deer in the headlights right now, but soon enough he will snap back to the unreality he lives in and deploy the only political trick he knows: rallying his base, abusing his power, trashing his foes. Many Americans will have to deal with the reality of a president who is not only incompetent to defend them but doesn’t even regard them as legitimate Americans worthy of protection. This epidemiological crisis is also a political one. We should prepare to defend against both.
Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University