Heading into the weekend before the election, President Trump is still trailing Joe Biden in a wide number of relevant polls. Though Trump could obviously still win, his chances have been substantially reduced for a simple reason: The U.S. response to the coronavirus has made it a lot harder to argue that he made America great again.
The central argument for his victorious campaign, which came to be known by the acronym MAGA, means a lot of different things to different people. Ultimately, it hearkens back to people’s nostalgic views of a past time when it seemed as if America was on top of the world with a bright future ahead of it — beating Nazis, winning the space race, manufacturing the best products, and so on.
The idea of inspiring people by recalling historical moments of pride is not something unique to Trump. Barack Obama talked about “big things” that America used to do in arguing for high-speed rail and other infrastructure projects. More recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has invoked the moon landing and the building of the highway system to rally support for the Green New Deal.
It isn’t surprising that politicians would try to invoke the past. In the book I released last year, Fear the Future, I opened with a poll of young people from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics that found that nearly two-thirds were more fearful than hopeful of America’s future. As Tony Soprano put it about 20 years earlier, “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
At its core, Trump’s message in 2016 was that the best was not over, that under his leadership, we’d return to that time of might at home and abroad. Though Trump the person has been consistently unpopular throughout his presidency, when the year began, the nation was experiencing one of the most robust job markets in history. He had just eliminated the threat posed by Iranian terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani, restoring deterrence without a major escalation. Though this election was always going to be a bitter fight, at the start of the year, there was at least the argument he could make to undecided voters that things were going quite well. There were statistics he could cite to validate his campaign slogan: “Keep America Great.”
The onset of the coronavirus has not only brought mass death, economic devastation, and unprecedented disruption to civilian life, but on a daily basis, it is delivering a blow to the nation’s self-esteem, not unlike an event such as the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis.
We can spend a lot of time arguing various counterfactuals about how things could have gone differently with a different president at the helm. From the get-go, I have been critical of Trump’s inability to abandon his salesman’s happy talk approach to the virus, vacillating between being supportive of lockdowns and playing into the idea that COVID-19 has been overblown. On the other hand, it could be argued that the early response was likely to have caught America flat-footed no matter who was in charge. It’s hard to blame Trump for everything — the early delay on testing, mixed messages on masks and large gatherings among actual public health experts, and all the inept actions of state and local leaders.
Whoever is to blame, however, it’s hard to take pride in how we’ve responded to the coronavirus. And this is true whether you look at the unacceptable death toll or the level of closures. That is, although there are countries that have a worse death toll than America and there are countries that have been more shut down, few countries have had to endure as much death while simultaneously enduring as extensive shutdowns as the United States. So, whether you’re on the side that thinks we’ve overreacted to the virus or on the side that says we haven’t treated it seriously enough, you have something to be angry about.
It’s no surprise, then, that a Pew poll taken last month found that 62% said the U.S. handling of the pandemic has been “less effective” than other wealthy countries, compared to just 13% who said it has been “more effective.” The rest of the world once looked to America as an example to emulate. But when Pew asked residents of 13 other countries about America’s response, the median result was that 84% said the U.S. handling of the virus has been bad. And that was before the most recent surge.
If the best that can be said right now is that Europe is also struggling to contain the virus, that doesn’t really help revive the sense of national greatness. It’s embedded into our national consciousness that while the U.S. was slow to enter World War II, once we did, our factories got humming and our heroism saved Europe.
Given this understanding of our past, early on in the pandemic, the idea that America was experiencing shortages of basic protective gear such as masks even for front-line medical workers was shocking to many. The detrimental impact of being so dependent on China for the manufacture of crucial goods has become much more apparent. Few living can recall a time when there were actually shortages of food and consumer goods available for purchase. Not to mention the economic turmoil and education crisis. In France, where cases are surging and a new national lockdown has been ordered, schools will remain open while millions of children are still suffering through distance learning.
It’s true that it’s unfair to compare the current situation to America’s role in World War II while leaving out the fact that we were completely unprepared at the start of the war, that there were plenty of setbacks between Pearl Harbor and D-Day, and that after D-Day, there was still a long slog through Europe and the Pacific theater. Had the history of the war effort been written in 1942, it would have been a catalog of failure.
So, it’s possible that the U.S. ends up inventing the best vaccine and distributing it in record time and becoming the envy of the world once again.
However, all of that is unknown. As the public goes to vote and look back on the past eight months, there isn’t much to invoke their sense of national pride, and as cases surge, it doesn’t feel like the situation is getting any better or that there is any end in sight.
Toss everything else aside, and this is clearly the primary obstacle to Trump convincing voters that he fulfilled his core promise to “Make America Great Again.” We’ll know next week whether he was able to overcome it.
