Trump: Job Two

by Jean-Louis Gassée

Trump failed to get reelected last November and has been hard at work on a 2024 comeback. Last week’s desecration of the Capitol put that plan in jeopardy. But a (highly speculative) look at Trump’s handling of the pandemic shows he could have been easily reelected.

Trump: Job One, a November 2016 Monday Note, was an extrapolation of what we had learned about the just-elected President troubled relationship with facts and his pathological repulsion to losing. Just elected, Trump had to make sure that, four years down the road, he wouldn’t be ignominiously fired like a washout candidate on The Apprentice.

The extrapolation proved correct. As we know, until the very end, against recounts and unsuccessful lawsuits, Trump stayed in character, calling the election rigged and insisting he had actually won a second term. Still, as the clock was running out, as he saw himself dangerously close to leaving the White House, Trump had to salve his grievously wounded ego.

Having been cheated out of completed Job One, Trump was now focused on Job Two: winning back the Presidency in November 2024. That comeback victory would forever make him a Winner of planetary proportions.

Earlier this past week, I thought Trump was on plan. Weeks of agitating his most vocal partisans culminated in a Washington, DC gathering where he exhorted his followers to march on the Capitol. He’d join them, he added. (He didn’t, probably at the Secret Service’s behest.)
That was the morning of January 6th, when congress was assembled to certify Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President and Vice-President of our country. At first, I saw the march as a clever move: facing the inevitable, Trump was engineering a show of force, demonstrating at a crucial time and place he was a force to be reckoned with, a leader with a substantial throng of energized followers.

I was wrong. Things unraveled in horrible ways. The demonstration quickly turned into a riot that the Capitol police couldn’t contain. Five people died, Congress chambers and offices were ransacked. The planned Job Two show of force turned into desecrating the seat of our Democracy. At first, the instigator made a feeble show of telling his people to go home peacefully, repeating that he and they had been robbed, and that he loved them. That didn’t suffice and was followed the next day by a more statesman-like message promising a smooth transition.

The condemnation of Trump’s incitement to violence was (almost) universal and now, belatedly, Trump and some of his associates are kicked out of social media such as, but not limited to, Twitter, Facebook and even Reddit. Yesterday’s defenders of freedom of expression are now turning into cautious censors. This yielded more controversy and also snarky humor. After Google removed right-wing app Parler from its app store, someone on Twitter commented: ‘Wait until Google discovers what’s on YouTube’… a Google property. Apple and Amazon also kicked out Parler.

While we don’t know how much more virtue will be found in social and other media, it now sounds like Job Two is compromised. Trump surely won’t want to be counted out, but the legal and political liabilities he’s suddenly accumulated make his 2024 comeback plan very fragile. This in addition to liabilities accumulated before his presidency that were “suspended” while he was in the White House. For these, many observers thought Trump could raise enough money to play the delaying game long enough to run the clock until the 2024 election.

Let’s stop this line of speculation and switch to another one: Trump lost an election he was well-positioned to win.

Let’s go back to January 2020. The economy makes Trump look good and he can look forward to campaigning on his record, to being reelected. Job One done.

Then, the Covid-19 virus comes to the fore and Trump immediately sees it as a threat to his triumphal reelection — and tries to deal with perceptions instead of medical reality. As the record shows, he dismisses the virus, claims it will go away rapidly, before Easter or, if not then, when sunny days and high temperatures come back. He even tries to minimize the size of testing campaigns because they’d contradict his optimistic predictions. I stop there, the record of his denial of reality is well established.

Now, let’s dream up another scenario. One in which Trump believes genuine medical experts who caution him this is a worldwide pandemic. The President then sees an opportunity to burnish his image. ‘I’m your Commender In Chief. We are at war with a virus coming from China and, listen to me, we are going to make our country a world-class winner against the virus…’ Instead of arguing with scientists, Trump federates their energies, uses them to convince everyone to observe social distancing, confinement when and where needed and, using himself as an example, promotes the most basic precaution: wearing a mask. As he did in reality, he brokers agreements with vaccine makers/distributers such as Pfizer. The US spread of the pandemic is controlled, statistics for the number of cases and deaths are favorably compared to other countries in the West and Trump, after using the bully pulpit to direct citizens to protect themselves, can now proudly claim of having saved the country from the worst. He is triumphally reelected. Job One done.

Back to reality, Trump won’t look at the mirror, remember how the virus stubbornly ignored him; he won’t blame himself, that’s not his style. But, we citizens, with friends and parents that died unnecessarily for lack of a coordinated war against the virus can blame him and the sycophants who encouraged his deadly calculation.

Some will say the virus got us rid of Trump. I don’t join them, I think the toll in human lives — and economic consequences. — are too enormous. By all accounts, US Covid-19 deaths totaled more than 350,000 in 2020/ How many lives would have been saved had the President declared war on the virus instead of war on facts? Will this weigh more than his inciting a violent riot last week? Probably not.

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