The Trump Playbook: Ignore Deaths and Declare victory

Newsflash: Donald Trump is not an empathetic man. Empathy requires the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes. Trump has always been concerned with only one individual: himself. His win-at-all-costs mentality means that there’s not much there in terms of ethics or principles. The ‘“win” always justifies the means, so to speak.

A weak man obsessed with strength

This is why this crisis is especially challenging to someone like Trump. You can’t “win” against a virus. You can’t fight it with missiles, lawsuits, or snappy Twitter insults. Glancing through his Twitter feed, you’ll see that his favorite adjectives are “strong” and “powerful.” But you can’t describe desperately needed Covid-19 tests as “powerful” or heart-wrenching loss as “strong.” You have to show empathy, acknowledge your lack of understanding of science (or know where your own limits are), and be humble enough to hand the reins to experts in epidemiology, virology, and science in general. 

So this crisis hits all of Trump’s insecurity buttons:

• He can’t be the center of attention. 

• Someone else knows more than him. 

• And he has to work with people he disagrees with, like governors of blue states. 

Deep down, he doesn’t want to do any of it. And like Ezra Klein put it, he just “wants to play president on TV.”

Trump moves to the “pretend it never happened” phase

Whenever Trump runs into trouble he either gets bailed out (money from daddy, bank loans, or Russians), he walks away and pretends it never happened (Trump Steaks anyone?), or he blames someone else. He’s been trying all 3 with Covid-19. First he tried to ignore the problem, then tried to blame Obama, China, Europeans, individual state governors, and even doctors at specific hospitals. He hoped an unproven miracle cure would bail him out, and when that failed he suggested injecting light and disinfectant. So now he’s only got one move left: pretend it never happened and declare victory. What happens next can actually be quite scary. Because his instinct will be to try to censor any official numbers that show the deaths and number of cases are increasing. We’re already seeing this type of censorship in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis is blocking new numbers from being published. Along the same lines, the White House has shelved a detailed CDC “reopening guide” for governors and business leaders from being seen. 

The media is not helping

Trump likes to talk about how the media is always being so hostile to him, and it skews the conversation towards whether they’re being fair or not. But the reality is that they’re not being anywhere near hard enough. In what world can you imagine a President presiding over the deaths of tens of thousands of people, and getting mildly probing questions from a too-nervous-to-lose-access media? Sadly, it’s a testament to how much our institutions have already been dismantled. 

Nothing bothers an authoritarian more than transparency. Transparency is vulnerability, and  vulnerability means admitting mistakes. Authoritarians don’t make mistakes, ever. It prevents them from declaring victory at all times. We already pretty much have state-sponsored news media in the form of Fox News, but apparently that’s not enough for the mad king. He needs never-ending adulation and a news media that reflects the reality in his head. That’s why his team is now heavily promoting the far-right insanity-of-a-news-organization that is OANN. This is textbook authoritarianism, and Trump is desperate to rewrite the history of his failed response.

Are we past the point of no return? 

Trump’s supporters have fallen into classic cult-dynamic worship, and it’s incredibly hard to bring someone back from this type of brainwashing. They see no wrong, and tribalism keeps their anger focused on “the other” instead of their idol’s own failings. The way people usually free themselves from cult mentality is via distance (physical and mental) and disillusionment. The two are bound to happen eventually, but it takes a long time. In 10 years, I would not be surprised to see lots of “former Trump supporters” seeing the light of day saying “I can’t believe I ever supported him.” Distance and time are necessary for successful de-culting.

Right now our only hope is that this crisis helps accelerate that process. We can already count on his base of supporters getting smaller, not bigger, so it’s looking likely that he will lose the election.

But then again, his odds also looked slim in 2016.