Donald Trump’s speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday night was horrifying for many reasons: It seemed barely thought through, containing three misstatements that had to be clarified; he spoke without humanity when humanity is precisely what this first-order crisis requires; he blew a racist dog whistle while discussing a global health emergency; he humped the same notes of self-congratulation – that his early decision to impose restrictions on travel to China was bold, that America is superbly prepared – when the latter point is obviously untrue, and the former point is moot.
But Trump’s biggest crime Wednesday night was the short shrift he gave to what should have been his core message: Keep your distance. Yes, he mentioned it in passing, but only on the way to rah-rahing himself, denigrating foreigners, and announcing policies that terrified the markets. This was an opportunity to drive home, over and over again, the one message that practically every public health expert says is essential to stemming community spread, lest the pandemic overwhelm our hospitals. He had the command of all the big networks. Yet he didn’t.
Then again, it’s hardly a surprise. For Trump, the whole strategy of social distancing is a nightmare. It’s inimical to his political interests.
What Wednesday night’s address made clear is that Donald J. Trump is no one – and I mean no one – without a crowd. Audiences are what energize him, give him his confidence, his king-size certainty; it’s at rallies that he A/B tests his ideas in real time. Without a press corps to troll or an adoring crowd to feed off, the man is a shell.
No wonder he was leaning on aides not to cancel recently scheduled campaign events in Colorado, Wisconsin and Nevada until the very last minute, and that his advisers had to prevail on him not to announce another rally in Florida, tentatively scheduled for the end of the month. As we saw Wednesday night, if you put him in a room with only a teleprompter and a camera, he can barely make it out of a sentence alive.