This Is Our Final Warning

As the United States struggles to contain the spread of Covid-19, the calls to refrain from politicizing the crisis are as understandable as they are impossible. Understandable, because playing politics with a catastrophic public health crisis can only cause harm. In order to slow the spread of the virus, all citizens and institutions must be persuaded to alter their behavior in drastic and often self-sacrificing ways. To win their compliance with these measures, it is vital that they can trust the information coming from the government, and they will neither trust nor comply if they have any suspicion that government pronouncements are motivated by politics rather than the public interest. The President was thus absolutely correct in declaring, in his Oval Office address of March 11, that "[w]e must put politics aside."

It is impossible to put politics aside, however, precisely because Donald J. Trump is President of the United States. Only five hours ago, the President tweeted that his own health agency, the CDC, was unprepared to respond to a pandemic, and that this incapacity was (in part) the fault of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Undermining the public's confidence in the CDC can only make matters worse, by weakening its already anemic leadership of the national response to the pandemic, but the President is concerned with his own re-election and the political impact of Covid-19 in the short term.

This is an example of "Trumpism" in a nutshell. If the worldview of operatives like Karl Rove could be encapsulated as "Politics First," Trumpism is its hyper-steroidal evil twin: "Politics Only." There is no such thing as a durable or inviolate long-term policy imperative in the Trump presidency. Everything is subordinated to the President's perceived political needs of the moment.

The Covid-19 crisis and the tangled web of lies, contradictions, and non sequiturs that have flowed from the White House in response are only the latest and most egregious example of this principle. The full litany of mechanisms by which Trump reduces all policy to politics, from "fake news" to "the Ukraine hoax," to "Build that Wall!", is too long and complex to possibly document here. But the sheer weight of empirical evidence puts this basic aspect of Trumpism beyond the shadow of a doubt. The voluminous flow of luridly irresponsible statements from the President's rallies, interviews, or Twitter account generates endless speculation about his state of mental health or ideological nefariousness (this very speculation is, by the President's own admission, one of the key political advantages bought by his rhetorical strategy), but all such speculation is rendered moot by the clear fact that Trumpism, whatever else it might be or express, boils down to one thing: "Politics Only."

The liabilities inherent in such a state of affairs have never been more evident than what is transpiring in the face of the threat posed by Covid-19. Is the lack of testing capacity a product of routine government incompetence, or does it embody the President's obvious belief that "low numbers" of reported cases benefits him politically? Is the exception given to travelers from the U.K. done in the public interest, or out of consideration for the profitability of the President's golf courses in that country? There is no way to determine answers to these questions, and this very opacity hamstrings the federal government's power to lead in this crisis.

Despite paralysis at the federal level, a robust social response has begun to emerge. Colleges and universities are beginning to shut down, major sports franchises have cancelled season play, civic organizations are moving to cancel conferences and other large social gatherings. Why? Because despite the lack of coordinated federal leadership, the free flow of information has made the scale of the crisis apparent, and responsible leaders at multiple levels of government and civil society have spontaneously acted on the reported facts of the emergency. We are still a free society, and the members of a free society are empowered to mobilize for one-another's protection and welfare.

Quick action at the state and local level may yet save us from the worst case scenario. If Donald Trump is re-elected, however, such a robust social response to the next crisis will not be possible. During a second Trump term the free flow of information that facilitated the emergence of the current campaign against Covid-19 will slow and then stop.

Why? One does not have to imagine that Donald Trump is mad or that he leads a diabolically authoritarian conspiracy to understand the reasons for this future outcome. If, like President Trump, you are committed to a governance built around the principle of "Politics Only," then the minimal functionality of government requires you to control perceptions, and the only way to control perceptions is to stop the free flow of information. We can already see this mechanism at work in the dynamics of the Trump administration, from its blanket refusal to comply with Congressional and judiciary oversight, its vehement concealment of the President's tax returns, and its constant efforts to expand the scope of executive secrecy into otherwise routine affairs. In a second Trump term the administration will move in ways small (restricting press passes to friendly news outlets) and large (using the AG office to sue unfriendly media figures), ordinary (propaganda) and unpredictable ("emergency" laws), to restrict the free expression of inconvenient facts and opinions.

The certainty of this happening can be inferred not merely from the administration's past behavior, but from the clear logic of their situation. They will not survive four more years of challenges half as vexing as those they have already encountered, if they continue under current conditions. Something will have to give. If the Covid-19 pandemic provides one clear object lesson, it is this: should we continue to entrust Donald Trump with the stewardship of our system, the system itself is doomed. This is our final warning.