Plague Journal (42): Trump's Challenge

From the start of this lockdown or nearly the start, the Trump-loving crowd has mostly taken the position that the lockdown itself has been an overreaction, engendered by panic-mongers in the media. In the early stages of their resistance, they filled social media with mostly bogus memes having to do either with conspiracy theories (often involving Bill Gates), evidence that the media was willfully lying about the danger, or sometimes miracle cures. When in the early stages the president was scoffing at the idea that this virus posed a grave danger, these memes scoffed along with him. In other words, Trump was positioning himself with the incipient resistance to the lockdown. But then, when Trump changed direction and began to take the virus seriously, his meming minions never seemed to feel betrayed or to hold this change of heart against him. Even though his daily press conferences featured Fauci and Birx (Fauci especially is often portrayed as a co-conspirator with Gates), I have never heard of a Trump supporter express any disappointment or anger at this seeming betrayal.

This is lucky for Trump himself, because I think his re-election depends on his ability to portray himself as the leader of the resistance to the Deep State. He's in the tricky position of needing to take credit for saving countless lives by way of the biggest and most far-reaching move of the nanny-state in history, and yet also to portray himself as the commander of the don't-tread-on-me resistance to that very move. He'll need to portray Joe Biden as a creature of the Deep State, and himself as the people's hero, fighting a media/government cabal that is deceiving America.

So, I expect him to become, sooner than later, a full-throated exponent of lifting the lockdown. Republican governors will lift things sooner than Democratic ones, and the Trump that tweeted "Liberate Michigan," etc., a week or two ago, will be back to stay. Trump as Resistance-fighter is the image that will lead him to victory in the next election, or so he's betting. Remember how he at first wanted to portray himself as the leader who had the authority to decide when the lockdown would be lifted, but then quickly pivoted to an "it's up to the states" message? That pivot allows him to divorce himself from any harmful effects of the lockdown ("Hey, it's not me, it's up to the states!") and provides him with a ready-made foil: Democratic governors. 

But again, it's a tricky play. If the infection-rates skyrocket after the lockdown is lifted, many in the media will blame Trump. Trump is the man who told us only yesterday that he built the greatest economy in the history of the world, but if it's still sputtering in the Fall, who will he blame? He needs to position himself now as the man who not only built that economy, but the one who got it going again. His enemy now is the lockdown. He'll need to blame the Dems for keeping it in place too long, while the media will blame Trump for any increase in infection rates (or deaths) wherever the lockdown is lifted. It's going to get interesting.