Veteran Republican operatives are worried that the president’s insistence on downplaying the coronavirus crisis, rhetoric at odds with respected medical experts in his administration, is falling flat with jittery voters.
“There’s a lot of obvious ways that this can really devastate his reelection,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. “Although, if he can rise to the occasion and Americans avoid the worst-case scenarios, it might be an argument for keeping him in office months from now.”
Support for Trump is holding steady. The president’s average job approval rating in recent opinion polls is 44%, the higher end of his range over the past three years, and he is as competitive in key battleground states now as before the coronavirus began proliferating in the United States in early March. But Republicans are worried about the long-term political impact, especially with the election less than eight months away.
As the coronavirus spreads in China, where it originated, as well as to other countries, Trump took action to prevent people infected with COVID-19 from entering the U.S. while standing up a White House task force and putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge. The president has since signed legislation that appropriated $8.3 billion to fight the outbreak and proposed emergency economic relief for affected industries and workers.
But Republican strategists warn that Trump’s habit of minimizing the scope of the pandemic is obscuring his administration’s response and undermining confidence in his ability to lead under pressure. The president has disputed government data regarding the number of Americans infected by the coronavirus, suggesting it was inflated, and blamed Democrats and media critics for fanning anxiety in a cynical bid to tank his reelection campaign.
Emergency stockpiles of supplies needed to address the crisis, such as face masks, are too low. Test kits rolled out as the virus made its way to the U.S. were faulty. Key advisers and Trump suggested the risk would be low while, now, the peril is growing.
“One of the challenges that occurs here for an administration is just the huge level of uncertainty,” said David Winston, a GOP pollster who advises congressional Republicans. “Anytime you have something of this scale, people are going to judge you in terms of how you handle it, particularly when it’s perceived as a risk to their personal health.”
Trump moved to reassure the public Wednesday afternoon in a series of posts on Twitter.
The president, providing the sort of update GOP insiders would applaud and that voters crave, tweeted that the administration is developing a policy to “prevent, detect, treat and create a vaccine against coronaVirus to save lives in America and the world.” But Trump also had some harsh words for Democrats in Congress, a nod to the suspicion with which he has approached the COVID-19 crisis, which the World Health Organization is calling a pandemic.
“Someone needs to tell the Democrats in Congress that CoronaVirus doesn’t care what party you are in. We need to protect ALL Americans!” Trump tweeted.
For some Republican insiders, the coronavirus is just another in a long line of controversies and crises that appear to be the end of Trump only to fade away.
They argue that Trump’s key, immediate political challenge is the high degree of public “uncertainty” about COVID-19 and how to combat it. Unless the mortality rate increases wildly beyond expectations, these GOP operatives expect the political atmosphere to revert to the status quo of before the coronavirus landed in the U.S. Once voters acquire more knowledge about the threat and feel they are better equipped to mitigate risks to themselves and family members, things will get better for Trump, they think.
“This will likely be long-forgotten by November,” a Republican strategist said. “Remember, impeachment was the only thing that was going to matter.”
