Difficult poll numbers, the virus closing in on the Oval Office, and his own advisers warning of coronavirus flare-ups if the country rushes too fast to reopen. As President Trump endured the most difficult week of the COVID-19 crisis, he responded in the way he knows best: hitting out at enemies near and far, new and old.
At an event in the Rose Garden meant to highlight progress on testing, he railed against his predecessor — riffing on the idea of a deep state of Democratic partisans who hounded members of his 2016 campaign.
“Obamagate,” he said. “It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected. And it’s a disgrace that it happened.”
The comments came after a whirlwind of 120 tweets and retweets on Mother’s Day that took aim at everyone from late-night TV hosts — “More Fake News, this time from Jimmy Kimmel’s last place show!” — and “sleepy eyes Chuck Todd” to judicial figures involved in the Russia investigation.
More followed on the day that members of the coronavirus task force appeared before the Senate health committee. In an early morning message, he hit out at old foe and MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough, demanding a cold case investigation into the death of a congressional aide in 2001.
The distraction tactic was a hallmark of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, when a carefully deployed tweet or rally chant went straight to the top of news bulletins. So too in power, Twitter threats against North Korea or Iran drove the news agenda for days or weeks. But things are not so easy when the national coronavirus death toll is more than 80,000 and climbing.
“The image I have in my mind as I think about those various rants is of a fish on the bottom of a boat just thrashing around trying to get back in the water,” said Rich Galen, a veteran Republican strategist. “The days when anything Trump tweeted became headline news the moment he tweeted it are gone.”
So on Tuesday, the bulletins still led with Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the country’s leading infectious diseases experts and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, warning senators that opening too quickly meant that America would “run the risk of having a resurgence.” It was a very different message to the one Trump delivered a day earlier, saying that “we have met the moment, and we have prevailed.”
And although a new poll found that a majority of the public now believes the worst is over, there was more bad news for Trump. Research by SSRS for CNN found that 55% of respondents disapprove of the president’s handling of the crisis, up from 48% in March.
Even if Trump gets a pass on dire jobs numbers — this is no normal recession after all but rather the result of an emergency shutdown designed to save lives — it leaves his campaign rapidly retooling for an election that was supposed to be a celebration of a booming economy.
Last week’s decision by the Justice Department to drop the case against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was forced out of the Trump administration early in 2017 amid scrutiny of undeclared contacts with Russian officials, provides one avenue. Aides and allies see a way for Trump to campaign once again as the outsider candidate. Hence the barrage of tweets reheating the deep state and witch hunt themes.
“The president is preemptively taking and controlling the narrative on the illegal, hostile, couplike attempts on his presidency early on,” said Sam Nunberg, an adviser to the 2016 campaign.
“And now, the president has the silver bullet. Joe Biden and his top surrogate … Barack Obama were intimately involved in the subversion of not only the Trump presidency but also the will of the people expressed in the November 2016 election results.”
The president might be struggling to see off the “invisible enemy” of COVID-19, but he may have better luck landing Twitter punches on Biden, a far more visible opponent — even when he is stuck in his basement.
