Let 2020 be known as the year that “political analysis” got so breathtakingly stupid that it died like an obese 97-year-old with an advanced case of COVID-19.
It’s a leap to even call “analysis” what journalists at the biggest newspapers are doing. It’s more like phrenology or some other pseudoscience.
Take this line from Farhad Manjoo’s Wednesday column in the New York Times on President Trump’s bout with the coronavirus: “The president’s actions tell a more honest tale, and suggest a way for the media to convey even to Trump’s loyalists the threat the virus poses: When he became the patient, Trump took it seriously. He did not react like a man who’d only gotten the flu.”
Manjoo, like most of his colleagues, is not someone commenting on a tangible, observable reality. He’s reading tea leaves and making up the results. How exactly does “a man who’d only gotten the flu” react? What would be the proper behavior for a 70-something-year-old with the flu?
Strains of influenza have been around a lot longer than the new coronavirus, and thousands of people, especially the elderly, die from them every year.
The idea that Trump suddenly “took it seriously” is a myth created by a media that has wanted the public to live in a state of heightened panic and fear over a virus with a mortality rate well below early projections. (There’s a good chance we find out it’s much lower when we determine just how much of the public has been infected and recovered).
For Trump to have continued campaigning, hosting White House events (which took precautions), and resuming a relatively normal public schedule for the past five months doesn’t mean he wasn’t taking the pandemic “seriously.” It means he was coping, just as everyone could have done and arguably should have done.
That we should either shutter ourselves indoors and be safe or else flush our health down the toilet was always a false choice. For the overwhelming majority of us, there was a third way: To take the appropriate health safety measures and try to keep living life. To prevent a disease from compounding into economic calamity and psychological despair.
Trump chose the third way. Yes, he got sick, but there has been no indication that he regrets anything he did or changed his mind about how we should be responding to the pandemic. To the contrary, he has said since his positive test result that, as president, he wanted to show that fear wasn’t the only option.
That surely bothers a lot of the people in the media, including Manjoo, who would rather treat the situation like it’s a ouija board, scanning for some meaning to fit his own prejudices about how awful the president is.
