The conventional view is that President Trump is having a bad war. Eccentricities that seemed tolerable, even entertaining, when times were good now make voters wince with impatience. Even if we write off his bleach-drinking advice as an example of his childlike stream-of-consciousness discourse, the president’s advocacy of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, as the evidence against its usefulness piles up, is unworthy.
It might make sense to push a sluggish healthcare bureaucracy to think outside the box, but Trump’s tone when he announced that he was still taking the drug was that of a peevish toddler saying, “Well, you can’t stop me, so there!”
Republican supporters are in despair: Their satisfaction at the country’s direction has fallen from 80% before the coronavirus to 48%. While there are several contributing factors, a nagging fear that the chief executive is not up to the crisis is surely one of them.
Yet, not for the first time, the polls are not behaving entirely as the pundits expect. Some surveys show Trump’s approval rating holding steady, some show a small drop, one or two even suggest an uptick — but none indicates a collapse. What is going on?
The answer may be that epidemics make people more introverted, less tolerant of dissent, more suspicious of strangers, more patriotic, more authoritarian — in a word, Trumpier.
Since the 2016 election, there has been a mass of analysis about the personality types of Trump voters. The academic genre of what we might call “biopolitics” (inferring people’s political views from their general character traits) is a young one, but its findings are striking. For example, asking people whether they would rather that their kids be obedient and polite or curious and independent is an astonishingly accurate predictor of whether they voted for Trump (the first answer) or Clinton (the second).
Trump’s support rests largely on those voters who have warier personalities, seeing crime and immigration as dangerous, fretting about terrorism, disliking foreign imports, and longing for order, stability, and hierarchy. Such voters are underrepresented in the media, but they are more numerous in the country at large than their trusting counterparts.
Trump understood that either because he had a clever behavioral psychologist advising him or because he has an intuitive connection with the electorate. Things that struck most commentators, including most conservative commentators, as excessively authoritarian (travel bans, abuses of executive power, threats to federal officials) didn’t bother the mass of voters.
Everything about the coronavirus should have confirmed the worldview of Trump’s core voters and, more importantly, shifted most swing voters in their direction. Trumpsters are more attuned to contagion and disease in general (for example, they tend to have a better gag reflex and react more strongly when shown disgusting images). But this isn’t just any old disease. It came from China, which Trump has long identified as a menace. Its early spread confirmed Trump’s critique both of Beijing and of self-serving global bureaucracies. Pandemics also strengthen, however irrationally, the case for economic nationalism.
Worse, liberals, in the early days, conformed to all the Trumpsters’ stereotypes, ticking people off for referring to “the Chinese virus,” fretting that racism was a bigger threat than the lethal infections themselves, attacking Trump’s preventative measures as opportunistic.
Put all these things together, and you have what ought to be a conservative perfect storm: a foreign virus that spread partly because of liberal complacency and corrupt bureaucracies, a virus that calls for a more autocratic response than usual, a virus that might have been designed to vindicate the worldview of a germaphobe president.
Except for one thing. When the crisis came, Trump did not behave as his strong-government supporters might have expected. Instead, he downplayed the risk and urged governors to keep the economy open.
Which brings us to the greatest paradox of all. Trump’s uncharacteristically laissez-faire attitude was almost certainly correct. It becomes clearer with every passing day that there is little correlation between the strictness of a lockdown and the infection and fatality rates. Easing the restrictions does not result in a spike in cases — whether we compare different U.S. states or different European nations. As a new J.P. Morgan report puts it, “The pandemic and COVID-19 likely have their own dynamics unrelated to often inconsistent lockdown measures that were being implemented.”
In other words, Trump was right. Not in his inability to understand the autonomy of the 50 states — that was predictable — but in his view that a full quarantine was disproportionate and that, as he put it at the start, the cure should not be worse than the disease.
How ironic that he should now find himself out of step with public opinion because he made the right call.
