Trump’s Great Enemy

Bernie Sanders didn’t want to prolong the ordeal in his race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and promptly cleared the way for Joe Biden to face Donald Trump in the upcoming November election. Sanders failed to recover from the blow he took in the South Carolina Democratic primary, where thousands of African Americans voted for Biden, who, a few weeks earlier, had seemed more dead than alive. The Democratic establishment is happy about Sanders’ decision, having always considered him too radically left wing to be win against Trump. With Biden, the Democrats feel more confident about winning, something that seemed an impossible task before COVID-19.

However, Trump’s mistakes, blunders and boasts around what he himself dubbed the “Chinese virus” are bewildering to his base as the death toll spirals out of control across every state in the country. Maybe the way Trump shoots at everything and anyone proved successful in a favorable financial climate, but now that the pandemic has put 10 million people out of work in only two weeks, his jokes have backfired.

Biden, who probably has received good advice, took the coronavirus threat very seriously from the start and issued a notably grave statement warning of the dangers it could pose for America. Meanwhile, via tweet, as usual, Trump mocked those concerned about the virus for being weak. The first time he addressed the issue seriously was at the end of February, to say that the spread of the virus in his country was “very low.”

If epidemiologists’ predictions are confirmed, the death toll of the virus in the U.S. will be extremely high, and will seriously undermine Trump’s chances of reelection. No matter how much he now tries to project the image of a leader who is concerned about the pandemic and who appears invested in his press briefings, the news media are condemning him, and the coming months will not be pleasant at all for White House staff. Trump has a rival in the presidential election, but his main enemy will probably not be Biden. Instead it will be his own appalling mismanagement of the pandemic.