Trump: A Crack Appears in the Cracked President

Donald Trump has yet again taken surrealism to new heights. Comments in which he suggested that one could inject disinfectant into the human body to fight the coronavirus made headlines around the world. Stifling laughter and dismay, doctors unanimously warned Americans against trying such an experiment at home, as Trump’s idea is generally only carried out by people who attempt suicide. If someone were to put such a scene in a play, the audience would declare that it was unbelievable. The surrealist French writer Alfred Jarry himself, if he were to write another installment in his cycle of Ubu plays, probably could not have dreamed it up.

This advertisement for Dr. Trump’s elixir is, truth be told, just the most recent in a long line of equally outlandish and bold statements uttered by the U.S. president since the beginning of the crisis. At first, the president fiercely denied that COVID-19 posed a threat, and later went on to propose that the country do nothing to combat the epidemic in order to protect the American way of life, essentially suggesting that the sick be deliberately sacrificed to save the economy. Then, he announced that things would go back to normal in time for Easter and criticized the stay-at-home orders put in place by governors, before abruptly calling for the total quarantine of New York state. Later still, out of the blue, he predicted that as many as 200,000 Americans could die, explaining that if his administration managed to keep the death toll under that number, they would consider its efforts to be very successful. More than anything, he was pleased with the only statistic important in his eyes: the record number of viewers tuning into his daily press briefings. In short, while the coronavirus death toll has recently exceeded that of the Vietnam War, he has once again demonstrated his encyclopedic ignorance, pathological boastfulness and unfathomable contempt for anything possibly resembling rational thought.

What’s new, some will ask. Trump doesn’t speak to Americans’ intelligence, but to their guts. By closing the borders and suspending the issuance of green cards, a form of legal immigration, he has once again singled out his enemy, the enemy of his supporters: foreigners, responsible for every ill, personified this time around by the “Chinese virus,” a totally new kind of illegal immigration. After seeing the disastrous effect of his disinfectant comments, he declared in all seriousness that he was pulling the plug on his daily press briefings, which he called “a waste of time.”

When reminded of these antics, many (overwhelmed) Americans respond resignedly, “The worst part is that he’ll be reelected.” But perhaps something has changed now, as if, perhaps, the parable of the disinfectant is the last straw. More than 90% of Americans surveyed said that they would refrain from attempting to ingest such products, suggesting that they have a bit of common sense left in them. But more importantly, for the first time in a long time, opinion polls are reporting a drop in the president’s popularity. Usually, crises drive up support for the president in the White House, but in Trump’s case, average polling results in the U.S. show that 52% of Americans don’t trust the president (although 43% still support him). In every poll, public opinion favors the protective measures taken by governors and condemns the president’s erratic peacemaking. More worrying for Trump is that in three of the states that clinched his victory in 2016, he is currently trailing his opponent, Joe Biden, by several points, despite the fact that the former vice president has pretty much remained in retreat throughout the crisis. Democrats are standing behind their candidate and they remember that Trump, although absolutely legally elected, lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

The game isn’t over yet, of course: Trump will aggressively play the anti-establishment card by pitting the coalition formed in the wake of Barack Obama and Clinton – an expression of a progressive, if not socialist, America bringing together East Coast bobos,* West Coast hippies and minorities – against an older and more rural, white and working-class faction of America, a strategy which hit the bull’s-eye in 2016. However, his catastrophic coronavirus response has put a dent in his reputation and the sudden appearance of a serious economic and social crisis is depriving him of his main campaign selling point. For the first time, this cracked president is seeing a crack in his popularity. It might just be a game-changer come November.

*Editor’s note: “Bobos” is a term for people who are both bourgeois and bohemian.