Trump’s only path to re-election is to convince the public he halted the pandemic crisis he created: columnist

March 23, 2020 By Tom Boggioni


According to a columnist at the conservative Bulwark, Donald Trump is already setting in motion a plan to turn the coronavirus crisis he had a major hand in creating into a plus for his re-election campaign that appears endangered as the U.S. economy is collapsing.

With the president hijacking the daily White House coronavirus task force press briefings and turning them into his personal “Showtime,” columnist Richard North Patterson pointed out that Trump is engaging in a pattern of lies and personal grievances that have always played well with his rabid base.

Despite overwhelming evidence that the president downplayed the coronavirus health crisis just weeks ago, the president is now claiming, “I felt it was a pandemic before it was called a pandemic.”

As Patterson wrote, “By now we are numb to Trump’s grotesque grandiosity. But that sentence may be the most frightening Trump ever uttered: It is so transparently false, so shamefully self-contradictory, so baldly contemptuous of freshly-curated reality, that it lays bare the infinitude of his crippling pathology—and, one worries, our own.”

And that, as Patterson explained, was one of the first salvos Trump launched that previews how he will attempt to cast himself as the hero who saved America from a crisis he created.

Providing a timeline of Trump claims dating back to January, Patterson paints a portrait of evolving rationales and outright misinformation from the president that have led to his desire to appear at the daily coronavirus press conferences updates that have replaced his MAGA rallies when it comes to playing to his base.

“Once considered, Trump’s claim of foreknowledge is even more remarkable than it seems. Effectively, Trump is admitting to deliberately endangering his fellow citizens by squandering precious time while spreading falsehoods and Panglossian palliatives for his near- term political ends—thereby inducing his followers to stake their lives on his own callous blather,” the author wrote. “We have seen the markers of Trump’s pathological narcissism since the first day of his candidacy: The demented sense of self-importance. The unwarranted belief in his own superiority. The total inability to recognize the humanity of anyone else.”

“For Trump, every day is Showtime: a new soundstage for glorious self-reinvention,” he elaborated. “Now, he informs us, he’s ‘a wartime president’ —clearly re-imaging himself as a leader who, like FDR, will repel the Asian invader who has assaulted our shores. Indeed, ‘I think we’re going to do it even faster than we thought, and it’ll be a complete victory.'”

According to the author, voters can expect a flood of self-promotion from the president who is trying to turn a negative into a positive.

“For Trump, forever chained to his hamster wheel of self, the past is always prologue. There will be more heroic posturing. More epochal incompetence. More political self-aggrandizement. More slanders against Democrats. More solipsistic press briefings. More efforts to subcontract federal responsibilities to struggling states and cities. More banishment of scientific truths and those who dare speak them. And much more misinformation – like the medical breakthroughs which never materialized, or the relief for embattled renters which doesn’t exist,” he wrote.

North suggests that strategy might eke out a victory for the president in November in much the same way he narrowly won in 2016.

“Because of the electoral college Trump need not muster a majority of Americans. He simply requires enough strategically-placed voters inclined to support the president who, in their hopeful imaginings, brought them to the brink of presumptive safety,” he wrote before warning, “After all, as even the historically-illiterate Trump surely knows, Democrats powered FDR’s reelection by insisting that ‘you don’t change horses in the middle of the stream.'”