From NYRB, Fintan O'toole writes about Trump's disastrous two months:
In a period when trust in government became vital, Trump would not let go of his obsession with the malevolent “deep state”—as far into the crisis as March 9, he tweeted, “There are still some very bad, sick people in our government – people who do not love our Country (In fact, they hate our Country!).” On the same day he retweeted a claim by the pro-Trump author Charlie Kirk that “Democrats and the mainstream media are trying to incite panic over the Coronavirus.” As late as March 25 he was insisting that “The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP.”
With this stream of disparaging commentary, Trump himself became a vector of the coronavirus. His followers got the message that the whole thing might well be a media and Democratic conspiracy, and therefore that they did not need to take the threat seriously. A Quinnipiac poll on March 9 showed the effect: while 68 percent of Democrats said they were concerned that they or someone they knew would be infected, only 35 percent of Republicans felt likewise. Belief in the seriousness of the threat is a prerequisite for self-protection (not to mention for reducing the spread of the virus)—Trump’s undermining of that belief is literally lethal to his own supporters.
We must bear in mind that Trump’s “real people,” the ones who make up his electoral base, are disproportionately prone to the chronic illnesses (the “underlying conditions”) that make Covid-19 more likely to prove fatal. A 2018 Massachusetts General Hospital study of more than three thousand counties in the US reported that
poor public health was significantly associated with the additional Republican presidential votes cast in 2016 over those from 2012. A substantial association was seen between poor health and a switch in political parties in the last [presidential] election.
For every marker of the prevalence of poor health (such as diabetes, obesity, days of illness, and mortality rates), there was a marked shift toward voting for Trump. Trump has acted in relation to Covid-19 like the God who tells the Jews to mark their homes with a sign so that the plague he is inflicting on Egypt will pass by their doors—with the malign twist that he has instead marked out his own chosen people for special harm.
Trump’s most remarkable (though little remarked) intervention was a retweet on March 22 of a March 18 column in the right-wing Washington Times by the Fox News contributor and former judge Andrew Napolitano. The article was a fundamental attack on the public safety measures being put in place to slow the spread of the virus. Napolitano describes state-level “decrees closing most retail establishments, particularly all restaurants, bars and theaters” as “totalitarian impulses” that “impaired the fundamental rights of tens of millions of persons”:
These nanny-state rules are unconstitutional, unlawful and unworthy of respect or compliance.
Why is this happening? Throughout history, free people have been willing to accept the devil’s bargain of trading liberty for safety when they are fearful. We supinely accept the shallow and hollow offers of government that somehow less liberty equals more safety….
Today, the fear of contagion gives government cover for its assaults on freedom and poses a question the government does not want to answer: If liberty can be taken away in times of crisis, then is it really liberty; or is it just a license, via a temporary government permission slip, subject to the whims of politicians in power?
By effectively endorsing these claims and inviting his fans to share them, Trump showed support for the belief not just that the restrictions on social gatherings could be defied, or even that they should be defied, but that they must be defied. If they are totalitarian and unconstitutional, there is a patriotic duty to flout them. “Live free or die” becomes “live free and dice with death.”
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