https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/in-coronavirus-donald-trump-has-met-his-match-1.992671

When the painful blows coming to Americans’ daily lives, health and wallets hit, it is his presidency that could become Covid-19’s most politically significant victim

The biggest question hanging over the Donald Trump presidency was how this political novice with evident disdain for expertise and boundless faith in his own instincts might cope with an unanticipated crisis. Due to the coronavirus, we now know: very badly.

The US president has met his match, and Covid-19 has cast serious doubt on his reelection prospects.

Mr Trump is a self-promoter, showman and salesman. His career has been based around what his 1987 memoir, Trump: The Art of the Deal, euphemistically dubbed “truthful hyperbole”. He is used to saying whatever he thinks will sound good.

However, the virus cannot be misled, bullied or cowed into submission.

Mr Trump’s first and most persistent instinct is to deny that any problem is serious. From the beginning, he has downplayed the pandemic, declared it contained and defeated, compared it to “the common flu”, and consistently suggested in many ways that concerns are vastly overblown. Yet the virus spread.

His second reflexive response is to blame others. For a President of the United States, that just does not work. He keeps untruthfully claiming that the previous administration, led by Barack Obama, put regulations in place that hampered his government’s ability to implement widespread testing. He is clinging tenaciously to this utter falsehood.

It will not work, because while the American system bestows enormous power on its presidents, it equally does not give them – especially after the first year – the ability to blame anybody else for tragic and consequential missteps.

Mr Trump insists he will not take any responsibility for the testing fiasco. But he knows he will be blamed.

Most Americans have yet to feel the real economic, social and health impact of the coronavirus. And Mr Trump and his allies, particularly on Fox News, have been spouting the conspiracy theory that this pandemic is being over-hyped by his enemies to try to overthrow him.

As long as the threat feels distant and theoretical, many Republicans may swallow that bilge. But once they face mounting closures and restrictions, economic downturn, and the sickness and possibly deaths of friends and relatives, the notion this is all overblown will not last.

Mr Trump’s presidency is therefore facing an existential threat it may not survive.

In times of crisis, Americans turn to their president for inspiration, reassurance, guidance and the steady hand of leadership. On March 11, Mr Trump finally addressed the nation on primetime television regarding the pandemic. It was arguably the most ineffective and even damaging speech any American president has ever given at a time of grave danger.

Americans yearned to be reassured and unified. Yet the speech was alarming and divisive.

Deprived of his admiring crowds and blustering grievances, he struggled and fumbled to read simple sentences. It was obvious that he would rather have been anywhere else in the world at that moment. He clearly likes campaigning, but not governing, especially when things are going badly.

His speech included mistakes and misrepresentations. He announced travel restrictions on Europe, but not Britain and Ireland – though they were added later. He also got key facts wrong about his own new policy, including whether it applies to cargo (he said it does, but it does not).

One early consequence of the ban was massive logjams at many US airports on Sunday night as thousands of Americans predictably rushed home. Mystifyingly, no provision for this seems to have been made and it is hard to imagine a better scenario for spreading the virus far and wide.

Errors in the speech continue to be discovered. Two days after it was given, Google quietly confirmed that it has no intention of setting up a nationwide coronavirus-testing website and could not explain why the president announced that. The company later said it would comply.

People naturally turn to their government for guidance based on reliable information. And in general, US government professionals – who Mr Trump routinely derides as operatives of a “deep state” – have tried to provide that. Astoundingly, the main exception has been the president himself.

Mr Trump has continuously misled the public. He claimed that the virus was contained and almost defeated, was not proliferating, and would simply disappear by the summer, if not in April, as if by “miracle.” He insists testing is available for all Americans who want it and blames Mr Obama for any problems. None of that is even close to the truth.

The lack of testing is mostly a result of the Trump administration’s incomprehensible refusal to accept World Health Organization testing kits, fumbling when trying to create their own kits, and interfering with efforts by local officials and medical scientists to improvise because of the crisis.

Worst of all, Mr Trump eliminated the pandemic directorate at the National Security Council that the Obama administration established after the Ebola epidemic of 2014. He said such outbreaks are not imaginable in advance. But they were indeed imagined and planned for, albeit by others.

Predictably, Mr Trump views the pandemic more as a political and public perception challenge than a budding public health calamity.

Compounding his woes, he will almost certainly be facing former vice president Joe Biden, not the self-declared “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, in November.

On Thursday, Mr Biden delivered his own coronavirus address. He reminded Americans what a normative presidential address in such a crisis sounds like. He had empathy for the suffering, wrapped the nation in his rhetorical arms, issued good advice and laid out a series of practical steps to combat the disease.

By contrast, Mr Trump offered inapt nativist railing against a “foreign virus,” travel restrictions, hollow boasting, false claims and empty bluster. It seemed unsettlingly forced and belabored.

His sentiments were probably better summed up in remarks last weekend when he reportedly told donors “They’re trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country. And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election.”

A parade of plausible clichés, including “the emperor has no clothes” or “the wizard is a little man behind a curtain,” vie frantically for attention. When the painful blows to Americans’ daily lives, health and wallets really hit, Mr Trump’s presidency may become the coronavirus’ most politically significant victim.