It’s the money. With President Trump, that never changes. The Dow at 30,000 was his obsession. Get to that number and the November election was a lock. Maybe even win with 400 Electoral College votes. A landslide!
The index came close. It was at its high of 29,551 on Feb. 12, more than three weeks after President Xi Jinping of China, his disastrous delaying tactics exhausted, warned that the coronavirus outbreak “must be taken seriously.” A Nasdaq record high followed on Feb. 19, almost three weeks after the World Health Organization declared a “global health emergency.”
“We have it totally under control.” That was Trump’s message at the time. Jared Kushner, Trump’s de facto campaign manager, liked that. So did Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. Don’t spook the markets! Champagne on ice! Trump’s path to re-election involved getting enough Americans to say, I can’t stand this guy but, hell, I’m making money.
This sordid calculation meant the opportunity to avert the Covid-19 disaster was lost. Warnings were ignored. Chaos prevailed, starting at the top with a president who can no more think through a process than feel empathy.
Effective testing was not developed. Medical supplies, masks and protective suits were not procured. As my colleagues have reported, Trump was furious in late February when a blunt warning from a senior health official contributed to a market dive.
“One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear,” Trump said of the virus on Feb. 27. On March 7, guests danced in a conga line at Mar-a-Lago as Trump hosted family and his buddy-in-bravado, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who has called the virus “a little flu.”
Seven weeks later, the plague so cavalierly dismissed has taken the lives of at least 30,000 in the United States. The number of jobless claims has reached 22 million. The Dow has sunk. Wall Street will not save Trump. Time for a Plan B. More on that later.
When the Pearl Harbor Commission on this American catastrophe convenes, even Trump the perennial escape artist will not be able to slither from history’s judgment.
There’s nobody left in the presidential entourage who can question his folly. The toadying of Vice President Mike Pence captures the terror that reigns in Trump’s off-with-his-head court.
Court is the appropriate word. “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said this week. Prompting Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York to the timely reminder, “We don’t have a king in this country.”
The thing is, Trump is the king. He’s Mark Twain’s king, more precisely. He’s the great American swindler, relying on the vastness of American space to afford him the opportunity to stay just ahead of disaster by conjuring up one more tall story. Twain’s king and duke in “Huckleberry Finn” — claiming to be the dauphin of King Louis XVI of France and the usurped Duke of Bridgewater — lie and scam their way down the Mississippi in the quintessentially American story.
“I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” Trump says on March 17. Twain would have seen material in the grotesqueness of that. The more fantastic the story, the more it muddies the waters. Trump needs very muddy waters because he’s a petrified coward.
In his whole born-on-third-base life, he has never been held accountable for anything. And so of course he walks back from his claim of absolute authority and tells governors to “call your own shots” on reopening the economy. His guidelines give him a veneer of authority without actual responsibility. No buck should stop in the Oval Office.
In his daily TV ramblings, he tries to blame anyone and anything, the World Health Organization being the latest. Trump’s genius lies in a sinister capacity to ignore reality and create another by getting people’s blood up in a whirlwind of chaos and distraction. That is how he got to the Oval Office and how he could remain there.
Plan B is already evident. The disparaged virus that could sink the market and blow up the path to victory is now the pandemic with electoral potential. Doesn’t corona mean crown, after all? It gives Trump a daily reality TV show. It attacks cities more than rural areas, where his vote is concentrated. It permits him to have the Internal Revenue Service send out stimulus checks for $1,200 with Trump’s name on them. It creates potential scope for him to claim emergency powers that allow electoral skulduggery. He knows that the Mitch McConnell-stacked Supreme Court will either rule for him or make sure things are slow-rolled enough to protect him. That’s his ultimate source of impunity — not what the founders had in mind.
The other Plan B element is the great attack on China. Trump, grotesquely, praised China’s “transparency.” Forget that. China-U.S. tensions will ratchet up in the next six months.
“Beijing Biden” is the new Trump offensive. He will hammer the presumptive Democratic nominee for supposed weakness on China. He has some ammunition. Trump is weak on American democracy, which is why Biden needs to shape up right now and save it. His focus, cutting through the Trump turbulence, needs to be more unerring than we’ve seen to date.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
