Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump spent weeks in denial, snapped suddenly into taking the threat seriously, reverted to denialism, and has, for the moment, toggled back to serious concern. In his Sunday press conference, Trump cited his public-health experts and refrained from promising a quick end to social distancing. Yet the threat of recidivism hovers over the presidency. At any moment, the wrong CEO or Fox News personality might get Trump’s ear and persuade him to toggle back to insouciance.
Trump’s congenital impatience is not the only culprit. Republican governors in several states have downplayed the virus, either refusing to enforce social-distancing measures or even overruling local officials who attempt to do so. A new study finds that the single factor that best explains the speed of state-level reaction is its governor’s partisan identity. “States with Republican governors and Republican electorates delayed each social distancing measure by an average of 2.70 days,” the authors find, “a far larger effect than any other factor, including state income per capita, the percentage of neighboring states with mandates, or even confirmed cases in state.”
Trump’s extreme, almost comic myopia has driven Washington’s laggard response. Having a television-addled president with the memory and long-term planning capabilities of a fruit fly is deeply unhelpful. But there is more behind Trump’s intermittent disregard for the virus’s danger than simple Trumpiness. As is often the case when analyzing any of the horrors of the Trump era, Trump’s coronavirus response combines his idiosyncratic personality disorders with ingrained pathologies of the conservative movement.
The skepticism has run up and down the food chain of right-wing discourse. The National Enquirer has hawked fake coronavirus cures. The Federalist published a column by a retired dermatologist urging readers to hold coronavirus parties to contract the disease intentionally, because it worked on chicken pox. Here is Ann Coulter sharing a chart that plainly shows the coronavirus to be far deadlier than the flu, but claiming it proves the opposite:
It is not surprising that the movement generated an alternative reality in which the conclusions of epidemiologists across the world could be confidently discarded. Nor is it surprising that Trump has clung tightly to such thinking at junctures in the crisis. It is almost impressive that Trump has managed to heed the advice of real scientists at all.