Trump Seeks To Redefine Himself as ‘Wartime President’

The coronavirus crisis raises the Republican president’s approval to the highest it’s been throughout his term. After minimizing the pandemic, the New Yorker presents himself as an epic leader around whom one should close ranks.

Economic recessions tend to be the downfall of presidents. Wars, however, have the capacity to make them the head of the household, a figure to cling tightly to when the nation trembles. The worldwide debacle generated by the coronavirus pandemic has a bit of both situations, and Donald Trump intends to position himself on the right side of the story. After he spent 1 1/2 months minimizing the danger of the outbreak, joking about it even, the U.S. president has placed himself at the head of the crisis task force with a direct and simple message, typical of his administration; “I look at it, I view it as, in a sense, a wartime president. … We’re at war … and we are fighting an invisible enemy.”

The current Republican president, one of the most controversial American presidents in modern history, had been orienting his November reelection strategy around the economic boom – full employment, the stock market record, tax breaks – and demonizing the Democratic opposition as new agents of totalitarian socialism. But an “invisible” enemy, as Trump says, or rather, a microscopic one, has rattled American reality. There is no longer prosperity, but fear. There are no longer attacks against government intervention, but instead, a $2 trillion public rescue of businesses and citizens, the largest in history.

The U.S. is already the first country in the world with the most COVID-19 infections, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Data Center, and the number of deaths exceeds 1,000. The number of workers who filed for unemployment reached a record 3.3 million last week, and Trump has decided to redefine his role by way of a medium he controls best.

The president leads a task force formed to confront the coronavirus through each and every daily press conference; some of the broadcasts take more than an hour of questions. He always avoids providing statistics on the number of deceased or newly infected, and engages in his usual squabbling with journalists and reverting to sarcasm. For example, when he was informed last week that Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, one of his archenemies, was self-isolating to prevent risk of contaminating others with the virus, Trump sarcastically let slip, “Gee. That’s too bad.”

In short, he remains faithful to the reality TV spirit of his presidency while taking advantage of the chance to draw upon heroic rhetoric. “Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation,” he said on March 18. “Now it’s our time,” he added, recalling the heroes of World War II. “We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together.”

His approval rating has risen to the highest of his presidency at 49%, according to a Gallup report on Wednesday. This is the same rating that was recorded between the end of January and the beginning of February when acquittal on impeachment charges involving Ukraine was imminent in the Senate. An increase of five points in popularity between March 16 and March 22 comes from none other than Americans who identify as Democrats (six points) and as Independents (eight points). And 60% of those polled approve of the way Trump is handling the crisis. The trend coincides with another survey published on Friday by the ABC News/Ipsos Poll, which reflects a 55% approval rating on his management of the pandemic, up from 43% the previous week.

Historically, Americans have closed ranks around their presidents when they’ve felt on the verge of an attack or a threat. From Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush; from James Madison to Abraham Lincoln, who delivered his second inaugural address during the final stages of the Civil War. Bush’s approval rating shot up by 35 points after 9/11, and he was reelected shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Roosevelt’s popularity increased by 12 points after Pearl Harbor.

If we had to choose a turning point in Trump’s management of this crisis, it would be March 11 when he spoke to the nation from the Oval Office and announced an array of measures, including the suspension of travel from Europe. Two days later, he declared a national emergency. He had already blocked entry from China and Iran at the beginning of the month, and imposed the first restrictions on South Korea and the affected Italian regions. And at that point, Vice President Mike Pence, who had been leading the press conferences, got out of the task force’s first line of fire, only to be replaced by Trump.

Meanwhile, the appearance in the media of Trump’s Democratic rivals has diminished. Restrictions on movement and public events, imposed to curb contagion, have in effect suspended the Democratic presidential campaign. Former Vice President Joe Biden, clearly the favored presidential nominee despite the ongoing campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, is trying to carve a place for himself in the public debate from a television studio installed in his house in Wilmington, Delaware.* If Trump says that restrictions must be lifted as soon as possible because the economic crisis could end up causing more coronavirus deaths, both Sanders and Biden will respond, but there will be an evident loss of public interest.

For Trump, the question is how much weight will be placed on those weeks in which he underestimated the crisis and the country remained unprepared with necessary equipment? For example, when he stated on Jan. 22, “It’s going to be just fine. We have it totally under control.” And on Feb. 27, when, referring to the media, he asserted, “Coronavirus − this is their new hoax … the press is in hysteria mode.”

In 2006, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote that the 1986 atomic disaster of Chernobyl was, perhaps, more definitive than his perestroika in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trump intends for this crisis to be his Pearl Harbor, not his Chernobyl.

*Editor’s note: Sen. Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign on April 8.