There are no libertarians in a pandemic. At least, that’s the callous mantra being passed around among private-sector skeptics, even as the private sector is being conscripted into the fight against the spread of Coronavirus, filling the gaps left by congenitally lethargic federal and state governments. By contrast, a public-health crisis produces a lot of populists. But where you would expect to see raw, indiscreet populism manifesting itself most heedlessly—that is, in the president—you don’t see it at all.
The world has been plunged into a public-health crisis at a time when Americans’ faith in their institutions and the experts who manage them is at a nadir. Donald Trump’s populist instincts would seem uniquely suited to exploit this dynamic for political advantage. And that impulse was evident when the U.S. closed its borders to Chinese nationals and after Trump denounced the Democratic “hoax” that his administration was ill-prepared for this crisis. But beyond that, the president’s response to the outbreak has been conspicuously free of grievance-fueled politics.
With only occasional deviations, the president has dedicated most of his public pronouncements to talking down the threat posed by COVID-19. “It will end,” the president told reporters during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control last week. “People have to remain calm.” Trump emphasized that the rates of infection and the number of people who succumb to the disease in the U.S. is low relative to other countries. He’s heaped praise on institutions like the CDC and advised at-risk Americans to take practical steps to avoid contracting the disease. “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu,” Trump tweeted on Monday. “At this moment, there are 546 confirmed cases of Coronavirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” He’s even gone so far as to note that most Coronavirus cases are so mild that “thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work.” Bad advice, to be sure, but indicative of the president’s efforts to soothe the public and the markets.
Trump’s critics do not allege that the administration has been recklessly demagogic in the face of this crisis. Quite the opposite. He is, in their view, aloof and detached in a way that conflicts with the designation “populist.”
More blanket border closures in the near-term are all but off the table. They would only complicate international information sharing and increase the logistical hurdles encountered by firms and agencies tasked with producing and distributing therapeutics designed to slow the virus’s spread. The president has signed an $8 billion relief package, which includes billions in Small Business Association loans for firms hurt by the outbreak, but the White House is also contemplating tax breaks for the beleaguered airline industry. And while no one in the White House is eager to entertain the prospect of a federal bailout, the idea has not been ruled out. What’s not on the table, according to economic adviser Larry Kudlow, is a universal stimulus program targeted toward individuals to boost consumer demand.
This is cold comfort to millions of Americans for whom a more populist response to this crisis would be most welcome. Trump has fallen “into the same trap as the cosmopolitan sophisticates,” observed New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “acting as though the specter of panic is worse than the disease itself.” Reacting to the president’s occasionally imprudent attempts to calm frayed nerves, the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher savaged the president. “He’s making this worse,” Dreher wrote. “It is our curse to be led by such a fool in this crisis.” The Washington Examiner’s editorial board warned Trump that “his current approach of minimizing the problem” will only “shred his credibility by making people dismiss his future reassurances.”
The left is no more forgiving of the president’s unruffled demeanor. “The rapidly worsening coronavirus outbreak is President Trump’s Chernobyl,” wrote University College London professor Brian Klaas, who accused the president of trafficking in lies. “Those lies will kill,” he added. By refusing to even contemplate the cancelation of campaign-trail events, New York Times columnist Charles Blow admonished, Trump is “making his most ardent supporters a petri dish of disease.” “When you see a Trump supporter at a rally telling a reporter for CNN that she doesn’t believe that coronavirus exists,” the New Yorker’s David Remnick averred, “there are reasons for that thinking.”
Doubtless, the president’s initial claim that COVID-19 “is very much under control in the USA” was wrong. His suggestion that a person with the infection can just walk it off at work is reckless. And there is a lot more the federal government can do to mitigate the effects of this outbreak on average Americans—contingencies that remain on the table if the pandemic worsens. But the steps Trump’s critics advocate—mandatory quarantines of unprecedented scope and panicked statements confessing to the federal government’s helplessness before this disease—would serve no higher purpose other than to validate their anxieties.
The president seems to have discovered that, in a true emergency, it’s actually pretty important that Americans trust government officials and public-health advocates. And while it may seem rather icky for the president to concern himself with the markets as much as he has, the risk to all Americans posed by a recession predicated on the anticipation of truncated profits and reduced consumer demand isn’t just a political consideration. People lose their jobs and homes in a recession. Lives enter a period of arrested development. Families break apart or fail to come together in the first place. A president who is not concerned about those conditions is as derelict as one who fails to give the Coronavirus its due.
It’s uncharitable to attack the president for attempting to talk the nation down amid a panic. Indeed, it’s almost more disconcerting for a president who is usually prone to whipping up anti-elitist sentiments to become so bloodlessly prudential almost overnight. But Trump’s critics have a point. For all his efforts to talk the nation down, Trump’s tactics are not working. There is surely more this administration can do to assuage the public’s concerns. Scaring them only to confirm the wisdom of the already terrified is not one of them.
