A few months ago, experts were predicting that Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders would be the greatest threat to Trump’s re-election chances but now it seems to be COVID-19, also known as SARS-CoV-2. It is not the spread of coronavirus that is jeopardising Trump’s image as a leader and his political campaign for the 2020 elections, but rather Trump and his administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Some political scientists have termed Trump’s strategy for dealing with COVID-19 as the ‘ping-pong’ tactic whereby Trump keeps going back and forth on his approach to several crucial matters including a lockdown, but experts predict that it could be the least of his problems.
How has Trump reacted?
SARS-CoV-2 began spreading to other countries in January and at the time, Trump said everything was in control as it was only ‘one person coming in from China’. On January 28th, Trump tweeted that Johnson & Johnson were working on a vaccine referring to an unreliable article which was later deleted following the announcement by Johnson & Johnson that a vaccine was not in development at the time. Throughout February, Donald Trump downplayed the disease by saying everything was in control, only immigrants were bringing in the virus, the borders will be closed and that the economy will be fine. Through early March, Trump continued downplaying the coronavirus, lying about testing capacity in US and started accusing the mainstream media of spreading ‘fake news’. As many states began enforcing some form of a lockdown, Trump declared National Emergency and insisted that there would be no nationwide lockdown but finally admitted that a recession could be possible. From this point onwards, Trump began changing his stance and enforced several precautions with advice from health experts and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Trump’s declaration of National Emergency came on the 13th of March which experts argued was too late. Declaring National Emergency is important as it frees up essential federal funding to deal with a crisis and in the case of the COVID-19 crisis, $50 billion was available to set up emergency medical operations and initiate other plans. Experts further criticize Trump’s response to COVID-19 in comparison to Barack Obama’s response to H1N1 in 2009.
The first case of H1N1 reported in the US was on 15th April 2009 and 11 days later (26th April), Obama declared a National Emergency. Obama’s quick response was praised as it is predicted to have saved thousands of lives although H1N1 was not as fatal as expected with a death rate of less than 0.5%. In comparison, the first case of COVID-19 in US was reported on 26th January 2020 and Trump declared a National Emergency around one and a half months later, on 13th March, despite SARS-CoV-2 having a death rate of more than 3% and being highly contagious. Furthermore, Trump criticised Obama’s response to H1N1 on Twitter saying that H1N1 was a complete disaster with thousands dying but Trump will be regretting that tweet now that the US COVID-19 death toll has crossed the US H1N1 death toll, and with most estimates determining that at least 80,000 people will die in the US from COVID-19.
Why did Trump react this way?
When Trump campaigned for the 2016 elections, one of his major promises to voters was to improve the economy by bringing back jobs and reducing trade deficits among other approaches. With the COVID-19 crisis getting bigger, businesses have closed down temporarily, supply chain has been upended, 6.6 million people have been laid off and the stock market has seen one of the quickest bear market declines leading to a generally poor outlook of the US economy. This is what Trump was trying to avoid by telling people and taking actions that ensure the public that everything is fine. However, now that one of Trump’s worst nightmares is a reality, – and perhaps worsened by a poor and delayed reaction to the crisis – he had to focus on another factor that could be highly damaging to his 2020 elections campaign.
COVID-19 Deaths
According to some reports, the White House and large parts of Trump’s administration wanted to push for aggressive testing as early as the end of February, but Trump and his campaign group were unwilling to commit as it could hurt Trump’s re-election bid. But now that the crisis has gotten out of hand leading to a downfall of the economy, the focus seems to be on containing the number of deaths by increasing testing and introducing precautionary measures. Limiting the amount of deaths is important as, to some extent, it reduces the damage done by Trump’s lack of early response.
What other factors could damage Trump’s campaign?
There are a wide variety of factors related to COVID-19 that could have a detrimental impact on Trump’s upcoming election campaign, but none of them are as important as Trump’s rejection of intelligence reports and CDC budget cuts.
Donald Trump has said that ‘the crisis came out of nowhere’ and that ‘nobody expected’ it, but intelligence reports dating back as far as 2017 suggest otherwise. In 2017, a leaked Pentagon report concluded that coronavirus infections are a common threat in the light of previous pandemics (SARS and MERS) and if US were to face one, it would be massively underprepared or lack medical equipment. In 2018, US’s intelligence community issued another warning declaring that both old and novel coronaviruses are highly transmissible viruses with high pandemic potential. In 2019 January, the US intelligence community conducted a threat assessment of pandemics in the future and found that US would be massively underprepared in several ways which would lead to heaps of deaths and disabilities, a broken healthcare system and economy, and increased calls for international support on the US. Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden will surely use these intelligence reports and warnings to his advantage by criticizing Trump’s incompetence, under-preparedness and poor handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
Moreover, since January 2020, US intelligence agencies have been warning the Trump administration of the seriousness of SARS-CoV-2 and that aggressive measures including mass early testing, introduction of precautionary measures, closure of non-essential businesses and stocking of medical supplies are needed to deal with the upcoming crisis. Trump declined to listen to the intelligence reports and continued downplaying the crisis throughout January and February. Trump and his administration knew the potential damage a pandemic like COVID-19 would cause since 2017, and the repeated warnings show that the crisis did not come out of nowhere and that it was expected to happen eventually.
Over the last three years, Trump had proposed to cut CDC budgets by up to 20% but at every attempt, the Congress blocked the move fortunately. However, Trump was able to reduce CDC staff working in foreign countries that assesses worldwide pandemic threats such as SARS-CoV-2. What’s interesting is that 36 out of the 50 employees working in China as part of the CDC threat assessment program were cut or removed from the operations. For 2021, the Trump administration has proposed several CDC budget and staff cuts such as a 20% budget cut on research into emerging diseases and a cut of 60 staff members from CDC’s disease prevention programs in Africa. The Congress is yet to approve any of these changes and determine a CDC budget, but these budget and staff cuts seem unlikely now that the US seems to be suffering deeply from the COVID-19 crisis. If anything, Congress is likely to increase CDC budget and staff to avoid a future pandemic crisis.
What has the Trump administration done well?
For one, at least the Trump administration declared a National Emergency, introduced some precautionary measures and acknowledged the seriousness of the issue although it may have been immensely late. In addition, with the help of the Congress, the Trump administration have approved a $2 trillion stimulus package which will aid businesses to stay afloat and continue paying employees, provide a monthly income and benefits to unemployed adults, give a one-time payment of $1200 to adults making less than 75,000 a year (plus $500 per child) and issue $100 billion to hospitals fighting COVID-19. This stimulus package is helpful in stabilising the economy temporarily and providing much-needed relief to small businesses and the people.
Trump’s strategy to divert blame
Since Trump took over the Oval Office, his strategy has always been to divert blame and responsibility when things go wrong, but hoard credit when things go well. In fact, on 13th of March Trump said, ‘I take no responsibility’ regarding the coronavirus outbreak in the US and over the past couple of months, he has blamed several people and organisations for the outbreak. Firstly, he blamed Obama for a faulty test that was developed by CDC on the Trump administration’s request after Trump did not request to obtain World Health Organisation-approved testing kits which the rest of the world appears to be using with success. Trump said that they had ‘inherited bad testing kits’ from the previous administration and criticised Obama’s response to H1N1 as mentioned before. Then, Trump went on to blame the World Health Organisation (WHO) for getting ‘every aspect’ of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak wrong. WHO has done many things well and it has done many things wrong due to it being a part of the UN which has created biases and politicised the COVID-19 outbreak, but it has not done as terrible a job that Trump makes it seem. Many experts are admitting that WHO should have been more proactive and open about SARS-CoV-2, but US and other countries who have let the outbreak get out of hand through a lack of sufficient response are more responsible.
Additionally, Trump has accused the mainstream news media of spreading lies, fake news and panic. Although certain news media organisations may have biases, generally the media has been reporting the seriousness of the issue adequately. Recently, news outlets have been reporting that US has shortages of ventilators and protective equipment and rightfully so as state governors and even certain White House health advisers have said that shortages exist, but Trump responded by saying that the media were spreading ‘fake news’. In one of his daily coronavirus press briefings, Trump also blamed US states for not being prepared and announced that states should be more appreciative of help from the federal government. Throughout his tenure, Trump has tried to impose as much authority as possible on individual states but now that there is a crisis at hand, he was initially less willing to impose the same authority to bring in medical supplies and share them among the states.
At first, the federal government was not helping individual states, so the states took the matter into their own hands by purchasing medical equipment themselves. Things have gotten so ugly in the race to obtain supplies that states have begun to bid against each other to receive medical supplies and shipments of protective equipment – seems like the United States are not united anymore. What has made matters worse is that the federal government now appears to be purchasing and outbidding orders made by individual states under the ‘Federal Emergency Management act’. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York disclosed that he had ordered 17,000 ventilators from China and the federal government outbid them to get hold of those ventilators. Although it is relieving to know that the federal government is finally making an effort to purchase medical supplies, it should not be doing it in such a way that it competes with local states as it not only prevents those states from obtaining key supplies, but also causes price gouging of medical supplies.
Lastly, Trump has accused China for lying, underreporting COVID-19 statistics, not being forthcoming about COVID-19 and repeatedly called SARS-CoV-2 the ‘Chinese Virus’. Trump may have his reasons for criticising and pinpointing the blame on the Chinese Government but calling the disease the ‘Chinese Virus’ is dangerous as it is likely to increase racism and hate crimes against Chinese people – with hate crimes and attacks already on the rise against Chinese people globally.
What about other candidates?
Now that Bernie Sanders has suspended his 2020 Elections campaign after calling his presidential race ‘virtually impossible’, it leaves only one Democratic Presidential candidate in the race – Joe Biden. Biden had been leading the Democratic primaries by a significant margin ahead of Bernie and would have most likely won had Bernie continued campaigning. Previously, polls and experts were predicting that Bernie would have had greater chances at defeating Trump in the General Elections (than Biden) but due to the COVID-19 crisis, that seems to have changed. Experts now say that it seems likely that the Democratic Candidate for the 2020 Elections will win – regardless of whether it was Bernie or Biden. When the 2008 financial crisis occurred, voters abandoned the reigning Republican party and voted for Democratic candidate Barack Obama who ended up winning by a considerable margin. One of the main reasons for why voters opted to vote for Obama was that the Republican Presidential candidate John McCain had been heavily criticised for mishandling the 2008 financial crisis. The mood in 2008 seems to be eerily similar to the mood right now in the US and the parallels being made are scary for Trump and the Republican Party. Biden is expected to attack Trump’s approach to the COVID-19 crisis and Trump has done more than enough to give him avenues of an attack on a silver platter.
Ratings and chances of re-election
According to many experts, the strategy to divert blame on others and take no responsibility for the mess that the US is in currently might not sit well with voters. This strategy to deceive voters and the public works well when the public do not see what is happening, but since the coronavirus outbreak is out in the open for everyone to see and potentially be affected by it, the strategy is unlikely to work.
On 24th March, Trump’s approval ratings were sitting at 52% but a poll conducted on 4th April showed that the ratings had dropped to 41% and that 53% of people believed Trump is dishonest. What seems to be more damaging is that 40% of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 now believe he has failed to address the coronavirus outbreak appropriately. Trump’s approval ratings are expected to continually slide with the number of deaths increasing and estimated to go beyond 80,000, while the economy likely to shrink and enter a recession. Once people personally feel the wrath of the situation through the death of a closed one or a loss of job and income, Trump may begin to lose his most loyal supporters.
Right now, November seems a long time away and the months that lie between now and November will be brutal and relentless. Trump is trying to control the narrative and keep things in order, to keep his re-election chances alive, but he might not be able to control the narrative for long as the situation worsens in the US.
