"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
So said our second President, John Adams. Ironically, this quote has, over many years, become a favorite of conservatives when doing battle with what they regard as the fantasies and fallacies of liberalism. George Will has frequently used it toward that end. But, to conservative politicians operating in the age of Donald Trump, the role of facts in their tactical decisions has been significantly altered. Facts have ceased to be stubborn. All too frequently, they exist in the alternative, depending upon the exigencies of the moment. Even more frequently, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, they do not exist at all.
If you've had the stomach to follow Trump's antics over the past four decades, this is utterly unsurprising. Trump has found that indeed, in his case, facts have frequently not only been stubborn, but close to lethal, given his contempt for the rules and desire to win at all costs. In response, his preferred method of dealing with them is to hide them as much as possible, even to the point of deliberately creating chaos in order to manipulate the public's ability to both get and/or understand the facts. Coupled with his ability to turn his press responses to the chaos into dumpster fires that a profit-first press can't possibly ignore, he has thus always been able to walk away from catastrophes that would have destroyed a con artist with any degree of personal shame.
But this is Trump's ultimate forte: he has no shame. Would a man possessing shame talk about his adult daughter on television about her potential to be a hot date for him? Would that man openly mock the disability of a reported who provided unfavorable coverage of him. Would that man openly brag about how his dubious status as a celebrity permits him to commit sexual assualt, using the coarsest terms the English language contains in order to do so? Obviously, the answer is no. At least that would have been obvious prior to the beginning of Trump's presidency; now, one cannot take this thought for granted.
So no one should be surprised that Trump's response to the pandemic followed all of the basics of Trump 101: deny, dissemble, and then attempt to confuse everyone by openly lying. And, in this instance, to lie above all about his own responsibility for the rapid spread of the virus, by essentially wishing it away with magical thinking and rhetoric that reflected it. Let me pause here just for a moment to make this one point as clearly as I possibly can: Trump has absolutely lied, and continues to do so, about his own neglect when it comes to taking the initiative that could and should have been taken in mitigating the harm that the pandemic has brought to the U.S.. Take a few moments to take a look at this. Then come back and read on.
Trump has been spinning the coronavirus story in much the same way that he has been spinning the story that he hitherto had hoped would carry him past the dumpster-fire track record of his Administration and on to re-election: the economy, which he essentially inherited from Barack Obama, and then artificially inflated with a tax cut that went straight to Wall Street and never made it to Main Street. Trump did nothing but create numbers, which is all he has ever created. He knows that, although he would rather die than admit it. But he knew that the threat of a pandemic might deflate those numbers overnight. So he tried to spin the looming crisis away.
But that's the problem with spin. It works much better in the private sector, and especially in the world of real estate development, where much of what is being bought or sold lies not in the reality of goods or services, but what people can be made to believe is being bought or sold. Transactions in this area involve a host of players from different sectors and, if problems come up, well, the buck of blame can always be passed on to someone else.
The buck, however, is a much different matter when you're sitting where Harry Truman once sat, as Truman himself knew well. In fact, in any sort of public service, it's a much different matter. Perhaps because the public knows that the taxes it pays purchase the service it receives, it is a lot more particular regarding the quality of it. Herbert Hoover, in many respects a much better person than his presidential record would indicate, found that out the hard way. As Calvin Coolidge's commerce secretary, he directed the federal government's response to the 1927 Mississippi flood, and did so competently, while mastering the art of communication to let the people know how well he was doing. When he tried to use those skills to sell bad or otherwise non-existent policy responses after the 1929 stock market crash, the result was different: a new president named Franklin D. Roosevelt, one who combined great policies with great communication skills to carve a unique place in American history. The moral of the story: spin only works when it has something of substance to support it, and particularly something that the public can see and believe. You can read more about this here.
Viruses are perhaps the most stubborn of all facts They don't respond to spin, no matter how desperately the spin is being performed. All that matters to a virus is science: testing and, ultimately, the development of a vaccine. Had Trump taken the early warnings about the virus, and the testing for it developed by the World Health Organization, he might have been able to greatly contain the spread of it and salvaged much of the stock market gains during his tenure, while otherwise enhancing his leadership credentials and perhaps doubly ensuring his re-election. But that would have required putting that reputation at some degree of risk, depending on the results of testing and the public's response to those results, to say nothing of being subjected to a nationwide regimine of testing in the first instance. Again, as I and others have previously written: Trump is a narcissist, and narcissists countenance no risks to their reputation--even at the expense of other people's lives.
And so Trump spun away. And, even as the facts grew worse and worse with each missed opportunity to control the coronavirus, he has kept doing so, even as the death toll mounted, because the only option was to tell the truth--which, in turn, would destroy his presidency, and force him back into the public sector to face financial ruin and criminal indictment.
And the press, which has for decades enjoyed the profits generated by covering the Trump three-ring circus, may be finally, reluctantly catching on, as individual reporters are increasing being fed up with being transparently used. Another stubborn fact, reflected here, as well as here. How much longer will Republicans, who have largely marched in lock-step with Trump, continue to do so, in the face of his melting media facade. In an election year, one would think not much longer. At least one Republican governor seems prepared to follow the facts wherever they go. (I'm not a Larry Hogan fan, but I respect his response to the pandemic thus far.)
Donald Trump, in the words of "A Few Good Men," can't handle the truth. He's spent his whole life fight it, successfully up until now. But at this point, not unlike the Martians in H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds," he may find his political career "slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this Earth." By one of them, anyway.
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