For a brief period in late March and early April, a slight plurality of the public approved of how President Trump was handling the coronavirus. Trump was at that time putting experts front and center and allowing them to brief the press every day. Cases were rising rapidly, but there was a sense of a plan to get through it and occasional acknowledgment of the tough road ahead.
But, months after abandoning that strategy in favor of happy-talk as the crisis deepens, Trump’s poll numbers have cratered. The public disapproves of his handling of the crisis by a 20-point margin, according to an average of polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight.
In a Fox poll, voters by a 17-point margin say they trust Joe Biden more to handle the pandemic. In the same poll, 29% of voters identified the virus as the country’s top problem, nearly twice the 15% who cited the economy. Also, 86% said they were concerned about the spread of the virus, and a 51% majority said that the virus is “not at all” under control.
In his business and political careers, Trump has mastered branding and self-promotion. In New York real estate and reality television, brash goes a long way. It can in politics, too: Voters may overlook broken promises such as building a border wall and making Mexico pay for it, seeing it as within the realm of campaign embellishment. But bluff doesn’t work with a pandemic, and voters don’t like it. Significantly, the White House appears to have realized this at the eleventh hour and is restoring its daily pandemic briefings.
Trump made many dismissive and triumphant statements about the coronavirus early on, and we warned him to adopt a more sober approach. His early statements — remember the boast: “When you have 15 people, and the 15, within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done” — are ammunition for Democratic campaign ads.
The public may have overlooked such things if there had been sustained and focused leadership more recently, for pretty much every Western nation botched its initial response to the virus. But things are now clearly worse in the United States than in most other places.
If we say that the goal of the response should be to strike the best balance between limiting death and allowing people to get on with their lives, America is faring poorly. The death toll of over 140,000 is grievously high, but it’s more bitterly disappointing after enduring months of lockdown. Some hard-hit states are now reimposing restrictions rather than loosening them.
Spain, Italy, and France saw huge spikes as we did, but their daily caseload is now down to a fraction of where it was at the peak. In the U.S., in contrast, new daily cases are twice their April peak. In much of Europe, schools either have already reopened or are planning to reopen in September. Here, more and more are announcing that they’ll close through the next school year and learning will be fully remote.
The American system is one in which many key decisions are made at the state and local level, but it’s difficult for Trump to run for reelection by taking credit for every success while blaming every failure on governors. Furthermore, Trump has been offering rosy talk and been giving mixed signals on the virus for months. And it’s hard to believe that he’s taking the crisis seriously when he spends so much time on Twitter settling personal scores.
When confronted by Fox News’s Chris Wallace with statistics about the surge in COVID cases in the U.S., Trump became defensive, arguing, “that’s because we have great testing, because we have the best testing in the world.” But although it is true that the U.S. has been testing more than it was a few months ago, that does not account for the whole increase in new cases. In the middle of June, just over 4% of tests were coming back positive. That number has more than doubled, to over 8%, which is where things were back in May.
Trump then went on to claim that the U.S. has “one of the lowest mortality rates in the world.” This is also not true. Judging by deaths per 100,000 people, the U.S. had the 10th highest number out of 159 countries, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Because deaths lag new cases by weeks, the U.S. is likely to climb the list and overtake more countries where new infections are currently low.
On Monday, Trump said he would be bringing back regular coronavirus briefings. That could be helpful if informational, but not if they descend into daily arguments with news media.
What is happening now is more than a mere communications problem. It’s a results problem. The spike in cases is worrisome, given that the summer months were expected to provide a respite. Most experts believe that there may be a big surge in the fall, coinciding with the new flu season. Should the U.S. enter that season with a high baseline of infections, things could get really ugly. If November arrives with widespread school closures, lockdowns, and surging cases, voters will not care for presidential bravado.
