The coronavirus outbreak at the White House has plunged Trump’s presidency into what crisis relations expert Eric Dezenhall calls “the fiasco vortex,” a phenomenon in which crisis overtakes a public figure, destroying any attempts to impose a favorable cast on developments.
WASHINGTON — It has never been calm in the White House of Donald Trump. It was never supposed to be calm. From the start, his old-fashioned administration was governed by a motto borrowed from the whiz kids of Silicon Valley: Move fast and break things. If it sometimes looked messy, the president and his closest advisers figured, that was simply the product of moving at a pace to which official Washington was unaccustomed.
Story continues“REPEAL SECTION 230!!!” tweeted obscurely the man who relished a comparison to Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain. None but his most devoted supporters could possibly know what he meant, or what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has to do with the pandemic that is currently killing Americans at the rate of around 800 a day. The answer is nothing.
“At the moment, Biden is teaching a master class on letting your opponent’s candidacy self-destruct,” tweeted David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, which analyzes congressional races. As the Democrats talk of winning Texas, Republicans fret about how Trump can promise to keep 300 million Americans safe when he has had such evident troubles managing the pandemic at the executive mansion.
Republicans who had not been part of Trump’s inner circle came around to that view, even if it meant that they were frequently finding out about White House directives from Twitter or Fox News. Such was the price of “winning,” many of them figured. Halloween is still weeks away, but the White House took on the feel of a haunted mansion. Workers in full-body protective suits moved grimly through the West Wing, disinfecting surfaces. Those who could stay away did, leaving the place to essential staff who had no choice and sycophants powerless to abandon the man who had elevated them from obscurity into the highest echelons of power.
In this category were loyalists like Dan Scavino, the president’s former golf caddie and current social media director. Back in July, Scavino shared an image on social media mocking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the widely trusted immunologist. His disregard for the advice of Fauci and other experts helped land Trump in Walter Reed last weekend, but Scavino was uncowed, rushing to the president’s side as quickly as he could.
And there is hardly anyone to stop it now. Of the four men who have served as Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows was the closest to Trump, not infrequently showing up to social events at the Trump International Hotel in pre-pandemic times. Although the former Freedom Caucus member who represented western North Carolina in the House may not have been an original Trump supporter, his obeisance proved convincing enough to win him the job after Trump grew tired of his third chief, Mick Mulvaney.
None of these aides seemed to recognize that their laissez-faire approach would almost certainly invite the coronavirus into the West Wing. Instead they insistently discounted this terrifically obvious conclusion. Meanwhile, contact tracing efforts have been so desultory that the government of the District of Columbia issued a letter asking people who may have been infected at the White House in recent days and weeks to contact appropriate health authorities. It was an astonishing and stinging rebuke from the government of a city relentlessly maligned by Republicans as broken and dysfunctional.
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