Donald Trump has sold his base supporters on climate change denial, but he’s pushing his political luck if he continues his flirtation with coronavirus denial.
Though we see signs of climate change in melting ice caps and increasingly severe fires, storms and temperature fluctuations, the worst ravages are in the future, and our human nature makes it too easy to put those worries aside for more immediate concerns.
Trump doesn’t seem to understand that COVID-19 is one of those immediate concerns, and his blase “we’ll see what happens” tone will bite him if people start becoming ill.
Some of the most worried emails I’ve gotten about coronavirus are from people I know to be strong Trump backers.
Trump and his boosters in the conservative media view everything as being about him and his political interests, which works with the voter base only until his interests conflict with theirs — and the coronavirus could be the first such conflict.
Radio host Rush Limbaugh, recently given a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump, started the coronavirus denial theme by dismissing COVID-19 as “the common cold” and claiming it was “being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.”
The president said on Twitter, “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus (his misspelling) look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action.”
He has seemed more worried about the stock market than the public health threat, claiming the market nosedive was caused as much by Democrats acting like “fools” in their most recent presidential debate as the coronavirus.
Fools the Democrats may have been, but the market took its steepest drop in the two days before the debate.
Trump said Tuesday in India that the coronavirus was “under control” and a “problem that’s going to go away,” only to become annoyed when his Centers for Disease Control said an outbreak in the U.S. was “inevitable” and warned of “significant disruption.”
At his news conference Wednesday in Washington, Trump continued to insist the chances of a significant U.S. outbreak were low, and passed coordination of the federal response to hapless Vice President Mike Pence, an easy target for future blame whose first move was to require federal agencies to run all statements on COVID-19 through his office, lest anything not line up with the president’s tweets.
Maybe Trump gets lucky, as he often does, and the virus peters out before becoming established in the U.S.
But if it doesn’t and he takes flak, it won’t be because others weaponized the coronavirus against him.
He weaponized it against himself by venting his political neuroses instead of stepping up as the leader a worried nation needs.
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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
