Trump Let the Right Make Him the Herbert Hoover of the Coronavirus

Photo: Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images Perhaps we will look back at the 2020 election and conclude that Donald Trump, who was always going to be Donald Trump, never had a chance to beat an opponent who led him in virtually every poll over a year. But if there was a path for Trump to scratch out a reelection victory despite himself, it would have paradoxically been opened by the appearance of the coronavirus.

The administration’s line on the coronavirus can be summarized as follows: It has been overblown by the media, we have turned the corner, there’s nothing that can be done about it, and the solution is to brush it off and go on with our lives. All these lines eerily track Herbert Hoover’s infamous response to the Great Depression.

Trump has echoed this delusional response with his claims that the virus was under control, it would all go away, and that the news media was trying to panic the public into overreacting when calm and confidence should have been the order of the day. And while this impulse did follow his lifelong tendency toward pathological optimism, it also tracks an important vein of right-wing ideology.

Their denialism ran along well-worn grooves. If the problem required government action, it must be overblown and the proposed government response must also be useless. Archconservative Senator Ron Johnson asked, “Why do we think we actually can stop the progression of a contagious disease?” Asked about mandating mask usage by 60 Minutes, Mike Pence replied, “We trust the American people” to make their own decisions, using a line conservatives have deployed for a wide array of issues.

The force that kept tugging Trump back on side was the Republican right’s fervent opposition to Keynesian economics. Right-wing dogma rejects the notion that a failure of demand is a problem that can be solved by government spending. Markets are self-correcting. Any economic problem can only be caused by excessive taxes and regulation.

jonathanchait That's just the bottom of his necktie sticking out there.

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