Every day, at the White House briefing about the coronavirus, Donald Trump gets the undivided attention of the media, a national television audience bloated by crisis and as many minutes as he wants to play a “wartime president,” as he grandiosely calls himself. Never mind that he flubs his lines and turns tragedy into farce. He’s the star. His billing communicates that he’s in command.
And every day, Joe Biden watches from the far reaches of the upper balcony as he waits and waits to be declared the de facto Democratic presidential nominee and assume leadership of his party. The coronavirus has postponed state primaries, prolonged the contest, yanked him out of the news and left him in political limbo, where he wonders if Bernie Sanders will ever acknowledge defeat and shivers in the shadow of another Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, who didn’t even run for president.
There was never any doubt that this pandemic would scramble November 2020, but how much — and how? At first, all the great oracles augured Trump’s long-delayed reckoning and his certain demise, given his hemming, his hawing, his lying and his economy, which was suddenly in tatters. This was it. He’d finally met his undoing. It couldn’t have happened to a more cavalier guy.
But over the past two weeks, that prophecy has changed — or at least turned cloudier. In recent polls, his approval rating ticked upward. His disapproval rating inched downward. There’s talk of a “Trump bump,” an appallingly cute phrase for an unthinkably dire development. Now more than ever, it’s hard to fathom four more years of this president.
Do we need nonetheless to fathom it? As usual, some pundits are getting ahead of themselves. November remains far away, and all of Trump’s happy talk won’t matter if the virus rages on and the dying doesn’t stop. There are reasons — ephemeral ones — that a slight warming of some voters toward Trump right now was inevitable.
But it’s also true that Biden has, for the moment, been dealt a remarkably frustrating hand.
It’s not that social distancing has separated him from voters and forced the cancellation of traditional rallies and town halls. As Alex Wagner pointed out in The Atlantic, his astonishing resurrection in and after the Democratic primary in South Carolina wasn’t achieved through barnstorming and radiant charisma; it was the consequence of an established brand, an excellent relationship with black voters and a quickly spreading recognition among all Democrats that they needed to rally around a plausible adversary for Trump, and Biden made as much sense as any other candidate.
So Biden’s forced estrangement from the campaign trail per se isn’t the issue. But what of his inability to hold in-person fund-raisers? It’s more difficult to rake in the dough when you can’t press the flesh, and donations will surely be diminished by the plunge in the Dow, the rise in unemployment and the general financial panic.
And what of his struggle to have a significant presence in the news? He’s doing his best. On Tuesday alone, he made virtual appearances from his Delaware home on three television talk shows. He just began a newsletter, announced an imminent podcast, and held an online news conference and an online happy hour with voters.
But had the pandemic not happened, he might now or very soon be allowed to act as the nominee-in-waiting, feeding the news cycle by planting rumors about his emerging vice-presidential short list or about potential cabinet picks. State primaries that were pushed back — Georgia’s is a prime example — might have given him a delegate lead so huge that Sanders was forced to cry uncle.
Instead, Sanders is sending the signal that his battle presses on by calling for another debate. Sanders holdouts and Biden-skeptical progressives are undercutting Biden by circulating videos of his most awkward recent interview moments, a pattern of behavior vividly documented by The Washington Post’s David Weigel. In his terrific newsletter “The Trailer” he noted that an MSNBC clip of Biden “was featured on ‘Rising,’ The Hill’s populism-branded morning show, in a segment titled ‘Biden CRASHES AND BURNS in multiple TV appearances.’” One of the show’s hosts, Krystal Ball, said to viewers, “Just ask yourself, is that the man that you want leading this response and this crisis right now?”
Biden has been restrained, but Trump is unbound. At a time when tens of millions of Americans have been ordered to stay home, when some of the distractions that they’d normally turn to are canceled or off-limits and when they have their television sets on, Trump is preening and pontificating for hours on end.
On Tuesday, between a Fox News town hall, a subsequent interview on that cable channel with Bill Hemmer and then the daily briefing, he dominated the airwaves for the entire afternoon. On Thursday, he zipped from the briefing to an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox, where, you’ll be shocked to learn, his handling of the coronavirus is characterized in heroic terms.
“It doesn’t matter that at least half of what he’s saying is at best wrong and at worst encourages people to do the wrong things,” Bob Kerrey, the former governor of Nebraska and senator, told me. “He’s the leader. And the media is basically doing what it did in 2016 and giving the reality-TV star what he wants.”
“The longer this goes on,” Kerrey said, “the more likely he gets re-elected.”
To most of the president’s detractors, that assessment is mystifying: How can his abundant misstatements of fact, delusional optimism and painful failure to pantomime empathy amount to an advantage?
They ask: What about the way Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx have been forced at those briefings to tweak the president’s message and correct some of his remarks?
Well, you notice that mostly if you’re skeptical and paying a kind of pointillist attention, focusing on the dots. What many Americans do is pull back and see the larger, gauzier picture, and that’s of the president surrounded by serious people who are under his command. While Fauci, Birx and some others are there to make sure that rationality and expertise are injected into Trump’s decisions — and should be commended for that — they wind up sanitizing and upsizing him. Call it accidental validation.
There’s something additional to consider: Trump’s minimization of the crisis looks different to different areas of the country. It looks most appropriate in places that haven’t recorded many cases of coronavirus infection yet, which happen to be some of the same places that voted for him.
“There’s a great swath of the country that is experiencing more what Donald Trump is describing than what you and I are experiencing,” Beth Myers, a prominent Republican consultant and longtime senior adviser to Mitt Romney, told me. (Her home, where she’s sheltering in place, is in the Boston area.) “Their lives are going on while the economy is cratering,” she said. “Now, that may change, but right now, it’s an urban-centered crisis. How does the person in rural Wisconsin think about everything? My guess is that they think that Donald Trump has the right tone: We have to take this seriously but not let it stop the country.”
In light of that, I’d expect a more impressive Trump bump, especially because there’s a long history of Americans’ rallying around the leader during a national crisis, when they’re emotionally invested in believing that they’re in sturdy hands. George W. Bush’s approval rating soared above 80 percent after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But in polls released over recent days, Trump’s approval ratings ranged from 45 percent to 50 percent. Yes, those were high for him, but in a period when the country has a motive for giving him the benefit of the doubt, shouldn’t those highs be even higher? In the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls late Friday morning, Trump’s disapproval rating, 49.3 percent, still eclipsed his approval rating, 47.3 percent.
That’s why Biden shouldn’t freak out too much. Trump may have a captive audience, but he’s still a captive of his own profound limitations.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
