The visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters was a move straight from the presidential playbook for a public health emergency. It was a chance to show a panicking nation that the commander in chief was on top of the coronavirus crisis, working closely with medical experts and confident enough to make the trip to Atlanta just as some areas were considering quarantine measures.
What happened next was anything but a textbook example. President Trump condemned the Democratic governor of Washington state as a “snake,” proclaimed his grasp of scientific matters — “maybe I have a natural ability” — and mused on his recent performance on Fox News. All while wearing a Keep America Great campaign hat.
For any president, the unfolding coronavirus pandemic would offer a searching test of that person’s ability to lead a fearful nation through uncertain times. The challenge is to walk the fine line between projecting confidence while raising enough alarm to persuade a nation of freedom-loving individuals to self-isolate at the sign of a dry cough and fever.
That path is even more fraught for a president elected, in part, for his populist disdain for experts, a skepticism for multilateral projects, and a direct, unfiltered style of communication.
“He’s not well-matched to the crisis. He’s not the type of president that goes into the CDC and makes the watching public feel comfortable,” said Jeanne Zaino, professor of political science at Iona College in New York state. “He’s not an empathetic president by nature.”
A rebalancing came five days later. Trump sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office for a prime-time television address. This time, he spoke slowly and gravely, as if weighing the import of every word as he announced a ban on travel from most of Europe and offered assistance to small businesses.
“This is not a financial crisis,” he said. “This is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”
This time, he came closer to what is expected of crisis presidents. Whether travel bans do more harm than good to the economy will be debated, but Trump was showing that he understood the gravity of the moment.
At times like this, the president has to be trustworthy and credible, said presidential historian Barbara Miller of the University of Virginia.
“The president himself has to be a voice reaching to the American people and, if it’s a pandemic, to the rest of the world, to calm people, to tell people what the administration is doing, and to give people information that they need to rely on to act appropriately in a situation like this,” she said.
For some presidents, that has meant leading by example. President Gerald Ford tried to kick-start an immunization drive to control an outbreak of swine flu amid fears the world was heading for a repeat of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
“I can well remember going to the high school near our home in Louisville, Kentucky, to get my swine flu vaccine,” said Miller. “That was something that was burdening us, that it was something we should all do after seeing pictures of President Ford getting his injection from the White House doctor.”
“He wanted to show that he was doing it, and it was important for everyone to be inoculated,” she added.
But his example backfired. Although a quarter of the population was vaccinated within 10 months, it turned out that the circulating H1N1 virus was a different strain than the 1918 incarnation, and the dreaded pandemic never materialized.
Worse, the use of a live virus in the vaccine was associated with a surge in cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, and the program was suspended.
For his part, confronted with a choice between carrying on as usual or acting as an exemplar, Trump has gone first one way, then the other. For two weeks, he promised to carry on with campaign rallies and plunged into crowds offering handshakes, before abruptly canceling trips planned for Colorado and Nevada.
The result initially was a flurry of mixed messages reaching the public, said Dr. Jason Farley, a nurse epidemiologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.
“I think it’s beholden upon our leaders to follow the public health recommendations that the CDC, the government, public health are recommending and to emulate those practices,” he told the Associated Press.
That was consistent with his view that the threat was minimal. “It’s really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen,” he said after meeting Republicans on Capitol Hill.
A day later, everything had changed. “This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” he told the nation in his Oval Office address.
