Old traits — bluster, defiance, implacable self-promotion — that once worked well now threaten to sink a presidency.
Before Herbert Hoover earned a reputation as a tragic failure, he had a reputation for heroic success—a can-do businessman who arrived in the presidency with no previous elective experience. He was one of the most celebrated men of his times. Then times changed.
Now Donald Trump during the pandemic is giving a new generation reason to wonder whether he—like other presidents who suddenly find currents of history shifting violently before them—is on the verge of breakdown.
In just the past few days (who keeps track of time in self-quarantine?), Trump has gone from shocking his own health experts with a prediction that church pews would be filled and the country “raring to go” by Easter to extending the national shutdown through April. He has questioned whether governors are exaggerating their need for medical equipment and then indignantly denied saying that the next day. He has boasted of the television ratings for his coronavirus briefings.
So what? That’s just Trump, right? We are used to him by now.
True enough. But there is a difference between the current moment and the pre-corona past. Previously, his most flamboyant behavior was, for many of his admirers, an essential part of his appeal. It is unlikely that many Trump supporters are genuinely enthusiastic about his parade of errant statements on coronavirus, from the claim in late February that the number of U.S. cases “within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero,” to his insistence earlier this month that, “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test,” even as the person shepherding the administration’s response, Vice President Mike Pence, was saying, “we don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.”
The fact that Trump’s style of boasting about himself and denouncing critics is thoroughly familiar is not necessarily reassuring when it is employed in circumstances that are radically unfamiliar.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/01/trump-breakdown-threaten-sink-presidency-158321