Germs are scary.
For three decades, I talked to Trump about his fear of germs. When I interviewed him at the Trump Tower restaurant during the 2016 race, the famous germaphobe had a big hospital-strength bottle of hand sanitizer on the table, next to my salad, ready to squirt.
He told me about the nightmarish feeling he had when a man emerged from the bathroom in a restaurant with wet hands and shook his hand. He couldn’t eat afterward.
Today, in a stunning twist of fate, germs are infecting his presidency and threatening a bad prognosis for his re-election prospects.
Trump is the first president to use the stock market as a near-daily measure of his success – and his virility – and now the market is slumping. If you want to own it on the way up, you have to own it on the way down.
Trump is learning the hard way what my fatalistic Irish mother taught me: The thing you love most is the first to go.
The scaremonger in chief has been downplaying the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic and joining Fox News hosts in accusing the “anti-Trump” media and “Do Nothing Democrats” of scaremongering about the virus.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mick Mulvaney told a cheering crowd that impeachment was the “hoax of the day” and now the media thinks the coronavirus “is going to be what brings down the president.”
Mike Huckabee went on the attack, asserting that Trump “could personally suck the virus out of every one of the 60,000 people in the world, suck it out of their lungs, swim to the bottom of the ocean and spit it out, and he would be accused of pollution for messing up the ocean.”
On Fox, Donald Trump Jr. said the Democrats “seemingly hope” the virus kills millions to stop Trump’s winning streak. Rush Limbaugh chimed in that the media “would love for the coronavirus to be this deadly strain that wipes everybody out so they could blame Trump for it.”
There are 2,800 dead worldwide and disturbing stories showing how federal criteria delayed the diagnosis of a California woman and how federal health employees interacted with Americans who had possibly been exposed to the virus in China without proper training or gear.
Yet Trump seems more consumed with how the Democrats might blame him for a coronavirus recession than with the virus itself.
He was so relaxed about the coronavirus threat that he spent 45 minutes Thursday chatting in the Oval with the authors of a little play called “FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers,” inspired by the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The play’s leads, Dean Cain of “Superman” fame and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” actress Kristy Swanson, were also in the meeting. Trump joked that he’d be willing to be Cain’s understudy, the actor said.
At the White House news conference, Trump preened, “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.” He later said that one day, like a miracle, the virus “will disappear.”
His top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, pushed the crisis as an opportunity: “Stocks look pretty cheap to me.”
This will be a deus ex machina test of Trump’s authoritarian behavior. Epidemics are not well suited to authoritarian regimes and propaganda, as we saw last week when Beijing’s use of propaganda tactics to suppress information about the outbreak failed spectacularly and when Iran tamped down news about the virus for political reasons even as it ravaged top officials.
The reality of the coronavirus spreading will reflect poorly on Trump.
Trump is already doing his orange clown puffer fish routine, acting as if he knows more about viruses than anyone, just as he has bragged that he knows more about the military, taxes, trade, infrastructure, ISIS, renewables, visas, banking, debt and “the horror of nuclear.”
Trump’s history in business – he makes people feel good for a while, and then it ends badly – could presage a stock market crash before he exits.
And it’s conceivable that a crash – along with hospitals being overwhelmed by the uninsured – could lead to the election of a real populist promising Medicare for All.
And that would be a very Trumpian arc indeed.
The New York Times