Altitude is a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering weekly perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.
Let’s take inventory of what new insights we have learned from the pandemic about U.S. President Donald Trump and his leadership character.
One could hardly miss how this crisis has fortified one of the two primary pillars of the anti-Trump argument, as advanced by his most ardent detractors. It has been insufficiently noted, however, the degree to which the coronavirus response has weakened the other pillar.
The first pillar is that Trump, in the near-unanimous view of the opposition, is a terrible person whose terribleness finds expression in terrible policies. He is narcissistic, dismissive of unwelcome facts, willing to traffic in falsehoods, lacking in empathy, erratic in personal manner, and, above all, impulsive in judgment. Are you following so far? Even a Trump defender could comprehend how Trump critics would seize on the performance of the past two months — “We have it totally under control,” he said on January 22 — to add damaging new counts to the indictment they began compiling four years ago.
It is the second pillar of the anti-Trump case that has wobbled curiously in recent weeks. This president allegedly is not just a near-term menace but a long-term one — a leader bent on amassing personal power and undermining constitutional democracy in ways that would last beyond his presidency (which, under the worst scenarios, he might even try, Vladimir Putin-style, to extend illegally if he loses in November.)
Many appraisals of Trump, from admirers and foes alike, depend in part on how one holds any particular moment up to the light.
The notion of Trump as authoritarian strongman, however, has been cast in an odd light in this pandemic. Would-be tyrants use crisis to consolidate power. Trump, by contrast, has been pilloried from many quarters, including many liberals, for not asserting authority and responsibility more forcefully to combat Covid-19. Rather than seizing on a genuine emergency, Trump was slow to issue an emergency declaration, moved gingerly in employing the War Production Act to help overburdened local health systems, and even now seems eager to emphasize that many subjects—closure of schools and businesses, obtaining sufficient ventilators — are primarily problems for state governors to deal with.
Trump’s apparent personal affinity with Putin, and other dictators, has caused foes to conclude that he has an aesthetic attraction to leaders who don’t let procedural niceties of democracy or law get in their way. But he has shown passivity in what by all rights would be a dream scenario for an authoritarian strongman.
Perhaps the way to think of Trump is as an authoritarian weakman.
“I don’t take any responsibility at all,” Trump said, a line that seems likely to join a pantheon that includes George W. Bush’s “Brownie, you‘re doing a heck of a job,” and Bill Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” as debacle-defining one-liners.
That was in response to a question about inadequate supplies of coronavirus testing kits, which many health experts regard as the essence of why the United States has been flat-footed in containing the spread of disease. But the spirit has animated other dimensions of Trump’s response, in which he has been reluctant to make Washington the focal point of pandemic policy. “The governors,” Trump said at a media briefing on Sunday, “locally, are going to be in command. We will be following them, and we hope they can do the job.”
U.S. President Donald Trump | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Quotes like these don’t mean the critique of Trump as aspiring dictator is in terminal condition. But it is on bed rest with a high fever. He “has abdicated the role played by U.S. presidents in every previous global crisis of the past century, which is to step forward to offer remedies, support other nations and coordinate multilateral responses,” editorialized the Washington Post. New York Times columnist David Leonhardt criticized Trump for declining to “mobilize American business” by invoking an emergency, and said the voluntary initiatives he backs instead “are far less aggressive than a mandatory national effort would be.”
Of course, even if Trump isn’t grasping for new power, others in his administration may be. POLITICO’s Betsy Woodruff Swan first reported on the Justice Department’s plan to seek new authority during emergencies, including asking judges to detain people without trial. “Over my dead body,” responded conservative Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah.) “Hell no,” added liberal Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)
Experience suggests one should not get too fixated on any single image of Trump — a kaleidoscopic figure at most times, and especially including this one in the midst of highly fluid circumstances like a global pandemic. Many appraisals of Trump, from admirers and foes alike, depend in part on how one holds any particular moment up to the light.
The diverse interpretations of Trump critics tend to fall along a spectrum. They tend also to return to a couple of deeply rutted debates.
One debate concerns how seriously anti-Trumpers should take him. At one end of the spectrum are people who find Trump an absurd figure to be president but essentially the political equivalent of a professional wrestler — lots of bluster and puffery that is ultimately devoid of content beyond self-protection and self-promotion. By these lights Trump is dangerous in a moment like the corona pandemic because he is in over his head, not because he has lots menacing plans in his head. At the other end of this spectrum is the belief that he may not be guided by deep ideas in the traditional sense of politics but he is guided by some clear and purposeful instincts — toward elevating executive power (as long as he is the executive), punishing enemies, and weakening traditional constraints of custom and law. This is thesis of a pre-pandemic cover story in the Atlantic by influential writer George Packer.
Rather than seize command in the crisis, Trump is determined to project that bad news is the fault of someone else.
The other debate, related, concerns how seriously Trump takes himself. Does he have any ability to detach himself from his own performance, to self-critique and modulate, to occasionally give a knowing wink to the audience to signal that he understands his act as well as they do. Or is he so fully immersed in the performance that he is lost in it — no longer makes a distinction between reality show and reality?
(Incidentally, these debates among Trump foes are matched by ones from Trump supporters. Is he a crude but surprisingly effective politician with whom one can make common cause — the Mitch McConnell position? Or is he possessed of some kind of mystical leadership skills — possibly what former Energy Secretary Rick Perry meant when he said Trump was God’s “chosen one.”)
The debate over how much Trump has weakened constitutional democracy in prepandemic episodes — his effort to nullify the independence of the FBI, for instance, or his consistent defiance of congressional oversight—is an argument without end, one that surely will continue years after Trump leaves office.
But the stylistic question — how much ability Trump has to tailor his brand of politics to fit new circumstances and meet new demands — may well have been settled decisively in this crisis. The answer is no.
U.S. President Donald Trump walks during commercial break at a FOX News Channel town hall | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
If he had the ability to modulate to the moment he would have done so. And at times he has tried to do so. “Acting with compassion and love, we will heal the sick, care for those in need, help our fellow citizens and emerge from this challenge stronger and more unified than ever before,” said at the end of his Oval Office address earlier this month, in a line that read like it was inserted at the insistence of someone else, like Ivanka Trump or Jared Kushner.
But his pugilistic instincts returned almost instantly, as did his instinct that the most important part of being a winning leader is bluff self-confidence. Rather than seize command in the crisis, Trump is determined to project that bad news is the fault of someone else. “The LameStream Media,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday, “is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success.”
There was an old Trump argument in a new era. Maybe the most surprising thing we have learned about Trump during the pandemic is that he no longer has much capacity to surprise.