Date: 2024-04-29 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00019764
The Trump Saga
Trump not in control
Paul Krugman ... Time, chance and the coronavirus
Peter Burgess
Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Donald Trump is doing a lot of whining these days, much of it about the coronavirus. The media, he complains, keep talking about “Covid, Covid, Covid.” How dare they focus on the deaths of 220,000 Americans instead of pseudo-scandals about Joe Biden’s son?
What is true is that if he loses, especially if he loses bigly — which is what the polls seem to indicate, but who knows? — the pandemic will be the main reason. But I’d say that all this whining is unbecoming in a president, if he weren’t so unpresidential to start with.
First of all, as the bumper stickers don’t quite say, stuff happens. Or as the famous verse from Ecclesiastes (which Trump would know if he were devout, or interested in literature, or actually read anything) more elegantly put it: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, not the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
A case in point: When the 2008 financial crisis struck, George W. Bush was president of the United States, Gordon Brown the Prime Minister of Britain. Voters in both countries blamed the party in power; but this translated into a leftward turn in the United States (which is how we got Obamacare) but a rightward turn in Britain.
Second, dealing with crises is, you know, the president’s job. And voters often reward politicians who respond well to adversity. New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern rode to a huge election victory on the strength of her country’s remarkable success in dealing with the coronavirus. Germany’s Angela Merkel also saw a surge in her approval rating as Germany coped with Covid-19 far better than its neighbors, although we’ll see how that holds up in the face of Germany’s rapid recent rise in cases.
So it’s interesting to speculate what might have happened if Trump had actually tried to do his job. For what it’s worth, the Economist’s election model, which currently gives Trump very little chance, had him slightly ahead in late March, when he briefly seemed to be taking the pandemic seriously.
Finally, the really striking thing about Trump’s tenure isn’t that something bad happened in his fourth year; it is that nothing bad happened earlier.
Trump’s first three years were eventful, at least by pre-Covid standards: there was a ferocious fight over health care, an escalating trade war with China, a scary confrontation with North Korea followed by a weird bromance, and more. But all of this Sturm und Drang was self-generated. Until 2020 Trump led a charmed political life; he never had to face a major shock that wasn’t of his own making.
Then came the virus, and the man who prided himself on being a disrupter found himself disrupted.
Clearly, he doesn’t like that at all, and he keeps trying to change the subject. Unfortunately for him, the coronavirus doesn’t watch Fox News.