I’ve been getting questions about Trump and coronavirus:
I’ll offer a reason this is a big problem for Trump, aside from what we know about how this will affect the economy, and how failing economies sink incumbent presidents seeking reelection.
Fascist leaders don’t know how to deal with a real crisis.
A difference between real and manufactured crises is that a manufactured crisis is controlled and doesn’t get out of hand.
That’s why “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” (1984)
In 2018, in preparation for the midterms, Trump tried to manufacture a border crisis. Remember the Trump-FOX-GOP attempt to spread panic about dangerous warlike invaders? (Really they were homeless, poverty-stricken migrant families.)
A manufactured crisis allows the fascist leader to “protect” the people from their “enemies.”
A manufactured crisis allows the fascist leader to pick a “crisis” he can control, and one that actually works for him. The fascist leader likes a crisis that lets him stir up the fears in his followers and then lets him strut around like a strongman so they feel safe.
Similarly, fascist leaders do not know how to deal with reality. They only know how to deal with a “reality” they create.
Trying to create reality was what this tweet was all about:
Trump’s life has been about creating a false “reality.”
He began by presenting himself to the public as a successful businessman who got ahead by smart dealings. In fact, he was a totally failed businessman who got ahead by conning people, cheating, and laundering Russian money.
He played a successful businessman on TV and people thought it was real.
The thing about Trump’s lies is that very few people actually believe them. Trump’s critics don’t believe the lies, and that’s more than half the voting population.
The GOP leaders who are propping him up also know he’s lying. (For more on that, see my Slate article from 2018, here.
A virus outbreak will not contain itself in poor communities. In fact, a virus is actually more likely to strike the Mitch McConnells of the world, who are in constant contact with people, then, say, a poor person living on the edge of town.
Oops! Wrong kind of crisis!
The problem is compounded by the fact that Trump, as part of his effort to take America back to the good old days of almost unlimited personal liberty for white men, is dismantling the federal government (all of the regulatory agencies) that he hates.
In the wild west, there were no government agencies designed to protect common people, so there were no rules limiting what (white) men could do. (For more on that, see this post.)
(*Voiceover singing: “Those were the days”)
Trump is at war with the agencies designed to protect us. Right Wing Propaganda has persuaded people that we’d be better off dismantling the federal government (deep state) and marching backwards. He and the Trump-FOX-GOP are doing their best to kill all federal agencies—including those designed to protect our health.
A virus outbreak causes reality to collide with myth.
The frontier was wild and white men were free, but there were lots of diseases.
With the outbreak of a virus, people start thinking: Maybe those regulatory agencies designed to protect our health aren’t so bad. Maybe big government isn’t always evil.
Trump is trying to make the problem go away by barking at it.
My dog does the same thing. JJ sits in the window and barks at skateboarders. He thinks it works. We’ve never been attacked by a skateboarder. He barks, the skateboarder goes by, and JJ saved the day!
(That’s because skateboarders are not a real crisis. But shhh, don’t tell JJ. You’ll put him out of a job.)
Trump barks. People pretend to believe him. So he keeps barking.
But viruses don’t listen.
In a totalitarian country a real crisis wouldn’t be a problem for the leader because he absolutely controls information.
The leader could tell the people that the virus was an attack from Eastasia.
That’s why the Trump-FOX-GOP is trying to desperately to control all information. We still know better. Most important: We can still act.
Here’s my list of things to do.
