Poll after poll—including new reports from NBC News/Marist and the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research out on Monday—shows Donald Trump falling further behind Joe Biden, thanks in large part to the pandemic he has steadfastly mismanaged. With fewer than 100 days until election day, support for his handling of the pandemic has hit a new low, and Biden continues to outstrip him in crucial states. The solution to the president’s dimming political prospects, then, would seem simple: just do something about the coronavirus. But Trump, true to form, has continued to dismiss the dangers of COVID-19, to face the pandemic with little more than wishful thinking, and to treat it as a political problem rather than the devastating public health crisis that it is.
His inability to change course for the public good, even when doing so is in his best interest, reflects his lifelong objection to admitting failure, not to mention his refusal to hear bad news. “The irony is that if he’d just performed with minimal competence and just mouthed words about national unity, he actually could be in a pretty strong position right now,” Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, told the Washington Post. “And he just could not do it.”
That has had catastrophic consequences for the country he’s supposed to be leading. Roughly 150,000 Americans have died in the pandemic, close to 4.5 million have been reported infected, and new cases continue to proliferate, even as other nations get their outbreaks under control. That hasn’t seemed to matter much to Trump as he pushes for the United States to resume normal life and for schools to reopen, with assurances that COVID-19 is more or less just a case of the “sniffles” that will “disappear” without intervention. According to the Post, his allies have recently attempted to get him to care about the pandemic by pointing out to him that the virus is now infecting “our people”—that is, voters in Republican-leaning areas, rather than those in previous hotspots like New York City. Trump has responded somewhat to those appeals, making a show of wearing a face mask; bringing back his coronavirus press conferences; and conceding that the pandemic will likely “get worse before it gets better.”
But anyone thinking this signals a tonal shift should disabuse themselves of the notion. The lesson of his public life, and certainly his presidency, is that there is only one Trump. Even as it hurts his electoral chances, he’ll continue to hear only what he wants to hear, sideline anyone who contradicts him, and point fingers elsewhere for his own failures. “This could have been stopped,” he said last week. “It could have been stopped quickly and easily. But for some reason, it wasn’t, and we’ll figure out what that reason was.” He might stick to his new script for a spell, as he did in late March. But no matter how much aides want him to at least try to pretend to care, he will inevitably revert to form. “His operating style is to double- and triple-down on positions and to never, ever admit he’s wrong about anything,” Anthony Scaramucci told the Post. “He can never just say, ‘I got it wrong and let’s try over again.’”
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