The politicization of everything corrodes social and constitutional life. That is especially so when the locus of politics is loyalty or opposition to whomever is president. The coronavirus pandemic may mark the first time it started killing people.
Especially early on, people’s views of the gravity of the situation aligned with party identification. Whether a malaria drug is an effective treatment for the virus, a purely medical question, has become a partisan issue. And there is little doubt that the death toll for the delayed American response to the coronavirus — influenced by President Trump’s desire to minimize its severity and maximize his poll numbers — will run well into the tens of thousands and possibly beyond.
The problem is less partisanship than politics, which now distorts all our judgments, even on matters that are not political. Long before this pandemic hit, politics was overtaking the sectors of civil society that used to buffer the individual from the state. The particular challenge today is the convergence of that trend with the lengthening shadow the presidency casts over the political realm, especially given the cult of personality that surrounds Mr. Trump even more than his recent predecessors.
Outsized antipathy or allegiance to Mr. Trump is now the defining feature of American political life. It infuses campaigns from City Council to governor to Congress. This has both corrupted the constitutional system and distorted the public’s response to the coronavirus.
The Madisonian system, about which we seem to learn more during crises than in civics classes, assumes that majorities and minorities will shift from issue to issue, so that a winner is chastened, and a loser comforted, by the knowledge that their roles might be reversed during the next controversy. For James Madison, this was the key reason it was irrational for voters to exploit momentary advantages to violate liberties: The tables might turn on them quickly.
When all of politics is seen through one person, those realignments harden into the uniform and often unchanging views of the president. Presidential politics bulldozes the subtleties and nuances that should define serious politics. The president’s perceived advantage or disadvantage defines every coalition and controversy.
At the same time, the proper constitutional distance between the president and the public is erased. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 71 that a president might have to protect the public against itself:
When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed, to be the guardians of those interests; to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.
This requires a distance that the accelerating personal relationship between presidents and voters does not allow. As George F. Will has emphasized, Franklin Roosevelt began his fireside chats by addressing his listeners as “friends,” suggesting that there was a personal relationship between presidents and their constituents. Yet presidents are not friends. As Mr. Will notes, their job is to lead the executive branch of government. We expect different qualities from personal friends and public leaders. Conflating those roles makes it more difficult for leaders to do the job we assign them with the distance and judgment it requires.
The coronavirus crisis has taken this personal presidency to an insidious new level. Recently, the Trump administration took two steps that historians may register as landmarks of the personalized presidency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mailed households a postcard blaring in all capital letters: “President Trump’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America.” And Mr. Trump reportedly indicated his preference that relief checks from Congress’s $2 trillion stimulus plan bear his personal signature. Through measures like these, the president emerges not only as our friend, which was problematic enough, but also as our personal caretaker. We are now to see public relief as beneficence flowing from one man.
The hijacking of the C.D.C. to serve the obvious electoral interests of a president seeking a second term is dangerous not only constitutionally but also to public health. There is always a delicate balance between politicians deferring to experts and making their own judgments. Unsupervised experts can display too much certainty and too little ability to balance the myriad competing ends involved in politics.
But plastering the president’s name all over the C.D.C. postcard was not about supervising medical experts. It was a hostile takeover of their expertise to serve electoral ends. Given the intensity of feelings about Mr. Trump, how many people threw the postcard away on the assumption that it was campaign propaganda? Worse, how many people waited for Mr. Trump’s guiding hand before taking precautions that medical experts had been recommending for weeks?
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, apparently fell into the latter category. A Trump acolyte, he did little to slow the coronavirus outbreak in his state until suddenly switching course not on the basis of medical evidence but rather on what he called an evolution in the president’s “demeanor.”
Many of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters still see this pandemic not only through his eyes but also through his electoral advantage. Right-wing pundits and conspiracy sites are attacking Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases because he has not parroted Mr. Trump. Dr. Fauci’s loyalty has even been judged by insufficiently adulatory facial gestures.
Jerry Falwell Jr., a fervent Trump loyalist who minimized the pandemic from the beginning as an overhyped media attempt to bring down the president (while always leaving himself a little wiggle room just in case), reopened Liberty University even after widespread closures of similar institutions in Virginia. Several students soon reported symptoms associated with the coronavirus.
There is a perilous irony lurking beneath this. Mr. Trump’s base is strongest in areas where the social fabric has been decimated by economic dislocation, addiction and other ills. Declaring an end to “American carnage” in his inaugural address, Mr. Trump promised to rebuild these communities. But what makes social ties vibrant is their genuinely personal and independent character, not the hollowness of purported friendships with public figures. The conquest of these social ties by politics erodes rather than restores them.
Mr. Trump — signer of checks, provider of health tips, filter for medical reality — is offering a diluted and delusive aura of a personal relationship with him as a substitute for the true relationships that constitute communities. What is disturbing is the extent to which the public has taken on this perspective, whether through the lens of support or of opposition.
The president has always made outlandish claims. But for his supporters, these abstractions have often been rescued by a patina of plausibility. Now, we have entered a bizarre space in which Mr. Trump makes concrete claims refuted by objective reality that people can see with their own eyes. We are supposed to wear masks and gloves: They are difficult to find on store shelves. He has claimed that everyone who wants a coronavirus test can get one, a falsehood disprovable in most circumstances by asking for one at a local clinic. He hoped the virus would “miraculously” vanish with warmer weather. It has not.
Based on Mr. Trump’s claim that at least 100,000 Americans could die from the virus, most people will know someone who has battled or succumbed to it. Will it still be a hoax then?
It is unsurprising that this president, whose narcissism is the stuff of Greek myth, is interpreting all these events through himself. For the sake of the Constitution, the social fabric and, now, people’s lives, that does not compel the rest of us to do so.
Nor does it compel us to think about this problem only in terms of one president. Democrats, too, have had their infatuations, and many now have their reflexive enmities. It is plausible that had Mr. Trump taken aggressive measures against the pandemic from the beginning, there would have been plenty of Democrats who would have instinctively opposed them simply because of their source. Constitutions that endure pay attention to institutions, not individuals. There will be other presidents and other crises. The personalized presidency is accelerating under Mr. Trump. It is unlikely that it has reached its peak.
Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at Assumption College, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Political Constitution: The Case Against Judicial Supremacy.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
