“For
his entire adult life, and
for his entire presidency, Donald Trump has created his own alternate reality,
complete with his own alternate set of facts. He has shown himself to be
erratic, impulsive, narcissistic, vindictive, cruel, mendacious, and devoid of
empathy. None of that is new.
“But
we’re now entering the most dangerous phase of the Trump presidency. The pain
and hardship that the United States is only beginning to experience stem from a
crisis that the president is utterly unsuited to deal with, either
intellectually or temperamentally. When things were going relatively well, the
nation could more easily absorb the costs of Trump’s psychological and moral
distortions and disfigurements. But those days are behind us. The coronavirus
pandemic has created the conditions that can catalyze a destructive set of
responses from an individual with Trump’s characterological defects and
disordered personality.
“We
are now in the early phase of a medical and economic tempest unmatched in most
of our lifetimes. There’s too much information we don’t have. We don’t know the
full severity of the pandemic, or whether a state like New York is a harbinger
or an outlier. But we have enough information to know this virus is rapidly
transmissible and lethal.
“The
qualities we most need in a president during this crisis are calmness, wisdom,
and reassurance; a command of the facts and the ability to communicate them
well; and the capacity to think about the medium and long term while carefully
weighing competing options and conflicting needs. We need a leader who can
persuade the public to act in ways that are difficult but necessary, who can
focus like a laser beam on a problem for a sustained period of time, and who
will listen to—and, when necessary, defer to—experts who know far more than he
does. We need a president who can draw the nation together rather than drive it
apart, who excels at the intricate work of governing, and who works well with
elected officials at every level. We need a chief executive whose judgment is
not just sound, but exceptional.
“There
are some 325 million people in America, and it’s hard to think of more than a
handful who are more lacking in these qualities than Donald Trump.
“But
we need to consider something else, which is that the coronavirus pandemic may
lead to a rapid and even more worrisome psychological and emotional
deterioration in the commander in chief. This is not a certainty, but it’s a
possibility we need to be prepared for.
“Here’s
how this might play out; to some extent, it already has.
“Let’s
start with what we know. Someone with Trump’s psychological makeup, when faced
with facts and events that are unpleasant, that he perceives as a threat to his
self-image and public standing, simply denies them. We saw that repeatedly
during the early part of the pandemic, when the president was giving false
reassurance and spreading false information one day after another.
“After
a few days in which he was willing to acknowledge the scope and scale of this
crisis—he declared himself a ‘wartime
president’—he
has now regressed to type, once again becoming a fountain of misinformation. At
a press conference yesterday, he declared that he ‘would love to have the
country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter,’ which is less than three
weeks away, a goal that top epidemiologists and health professionals believe would
be catastrophic.
“‘I
think it’s possible. Why not?’ he said with a
shrug during
a town hall hosted by Fox News later in the day. (Why Easter? He explained, ‘I just thought it was a
beautiful time, a beautiful timeline.’) He said this as New York City’s case
count is doubling every
three days and
the U.S. case count is now setting the pace
for the world.
“As
one person who consults with the Trump White House on the coronavirus response
put it to me, ‘He has chosen to imagine the worst is behind us when the worst
is clearly ahead of us.’
“After
listening to the president’s nearly-two-hour briefing on Monday—in which, among
other things, Trump declared, “If it were up to the doctors,
they may say … ‘Let’s shut down the entire world.’ … This could create a much
bigger problem than the problem that you start off with’—a former White House
adviser who has worked on past pandemics told me, ‘This fool will bring the
death of thousands needlessly. We have mobilized as a country to shut things
down for a time, despite the difficulty. We can work our way back to a
semblance of normality if we hold out and let the health system make it through
the worst of it.’ He added, ‘But now our own president is undoing all that work
and preaching recklessness. Rather than lead us in taking on a difficult
challenge, he is dragging us toward failure and suffering. Beyond belief.’”
“Yes
and no. The
thing to understand about Donald Trump is that putting others before self is
not something he can do, even temporarily. His attempts to convey facts that
don’t serve his perceived self-interest or to express empathy are forced,
scripted, and always short-lived, since such reactions are alien to him.
“This
president does not have the capacity to listen to, synthesize, and internalize
information that does not immediately serve his greatest needs: praise, fealty,
adoration. ‘He finds it intolerable when those things are missing,’ a clinical
psychologist told me. ‘Praise, applause, and accolades seem to calm him and
boost his confidence. There’s no room for that now, and so he’s growing
irritable and needing to create some way to get some positive attention.’
“She
added that the pandemic and its economic fallout ‘overwhelm Trump’s capacity to
understand, are outside of his ability to internalize and process, and [are]
beyond his frustration tolerance. He is neither curious nor interested; facts
are tossed aside when inconvenient or [when they] contradict his parallel
reality, and people are disposable unless they serve him in some way.’
“It’s
useful here to recall that Trump’s success as a politician
has been built on his ability to impose his will and narrative on others, to
use his experience on a reality-television show and his skill as a con man to
shape public impressions in his favor, even—or perhaps, especially—if those
impressions are at odds with reality. He convinced a good chunk of the country
that he is a wildly successful businessman and knows more about campaign finance, the
Islamic State, the courts, the visa system, trade, taxes, the debt, renewable
energy, infrastructure, borders, and drones than anyone else.
“But
in this instance, Trump isn’t facing a political problem he can easily spin his
way out of. He’s facing a lethal virus. It doesn’t give a damn what Donald
Trump thinks of it or tweets about it. Spin and lies about COVID-19, including
that it will soon magically disappear, as Trump claimed it would, don’t work. In
fact, they have the opposite effect. Misinformation will cause the virus to
increase its deadly spread.
“So
as the crisis deepens—as the body count increases, hospitals are overwhelmed,
and the economy contracts, perhaps dramatically—it’s reasonable to assume that
the president will reach for the tools he has used throughout his life:
duplicity and denial. He will not allow facts that are at odds with his
narrative to pierce his magnetic field of deception.
“But what happens to Trump
psychologically and emotionally when things don’t turn around in the time
period he wants? What happens if the tricks that have allowed him to walk away
from scandal after scandal don’t work quite so well, if the doors of escape are
bolted shut, and if it dawns on even some of his supporters—people who will
watch family members, friends, and neighbors contract the disease, some number
of whom will die—that no matter what Trump says, he can’t alter this
epidemiological reality?
“All
of this would likely enrage him, and feed his paranoia.
“As
the health-care and economic crises worsen, Trump’s hallmarks will be even more
fully on display. The president will create new scapegoats. He’ll blame
governors for whatever bad news befalls their states. He’ll berate reporters
who ask questions that portray him in a less-than-favorable light. He’ll demand
even more cult like coverage from outlets such as Fox News. Because he doesn’t
tolerate relationships that are characterized by disagreement or absence of
obeisance, before long we’ll see key people removed or silenced when they try
to counter a Trump-centered narrative. He’ll try to find shiny objects to
divert our attention from his failures.
“All
of these things are from a playbook the president has used a thousand times.
Perhaps they’ll succeed again. But there’s something distinct about this
moment, compared with every other moment in the Trump presidency, that could
prove to be utterly disorienting and unsettling for the president. Hush-money
payments won’t make COVID-19 go away. He cannot distract people from the global
pandemic. He can’t wait it out until the next news cycle, because the next news
cycle will also be about the pandemic. He can’t easily create another
narrative, because he is often sharing the stage with scientists who will not
lie on his behalf.
“The
president will try to blame someone else—but in this case the ‘someone else’ is
a virus, not a Mexican immigrant or a reporter with a disability, not a Muslim or a Clinton, not
a dead war hero or a family of a
fallen soldier,
not a special counsel or an NFL player who kneels for the national anthem. He
will try to use this crisis to pit one party against the other—but the virus
will kill both Republicans and Democrats. He will try to create an alternate
story to distract people from an inconvenient truth—but in this case, the
public is too afraid, the story is too big, and the carnage will be too great
to be distracted from it.
“America
will make it to the other side of this crisis, as it has after every other
crisis. But the struggle will be a good deal harder, and the human cost a good
deal higher, because we elected as president a man who is so damaged and so
broken in so many ways.”
PETER WEHNER is
a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a
senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Egan visiting
professor at Duke University. He writes widely on political, cultural,
religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.
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