Add Trump’s COVID diagnosis to the political chaos of his troubled re-election campaign | Opinion
There’s a lot of uncertainty over what will be the ultimate impact of President Trump’s COVID-19 infection on the Nov. 3 elections. But one thing is clear: It will put the coronavirus pandemic front and center of the electoral agenda again. That’s bad news for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Before he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Trump was desperately trying to shift the focus of the race away from the pandemic.
He sought to make the elections about his dubious claim that the United States would become a socialist country if Democratic candidate Joe Biden won, about the alleged threat of antifa radical leftist violence and about his questionable assertions that the U.S. economy is making a roaring comeback.
And he tried to dismiss the pandemic as a problem that was almost solved. As late as Thursday night, on the very day he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Trump said in a prerecorded speech to a Catholic charity dinner in New York that, “The end of the pandemic is in sight, and next year will be one of the greatest years in the history of our country.”
Granted, as I am writing this there is a reasonable chance that — despite being 74 years old and obese — Trump will not get seriously ill. Despite being 7 points behind Biden in the polls before he was infected, Trump could still run a competitive campaign, and perhaps even improve his political standing.
That’s what happened in Brazil when President Jair Bolsonaro — who, much like Trump, had minimized and mocked the pandemic — came down with COVID-19 in July.
As Brazilian journalist Thomas Traumann wrote in the America’s Quarterly magazine, Bolsonaro “soon got better and ultimately came away from it all as a living proof of his creed: The coronavirus was only a flu, just as he had said.”
Others say Bolsonaro’s recovery made him look superhuman, helping him increase his popularity. Maybe that’s what will happen with Trump. But I doubt it.
More likely, the daily headlines about Trump’s COVID-19 in the final weeks before the elections will only underscore the huge mistake Trump made by minimizing the pandemic. Here’s what will be on voters’ minds as early voting starts in several states over the next three weeks:
- Something has gone terribly wrong in the United States. The country has only 4 percent of the world’s population, but about 20 percent of the world’s COVID-19 deaths.
Trump and Pence, who, according to 538 political website, would most likely replace Trump as the Republican candidate if the president were incapacitated claim this is because many countries don’t release accurate coronavirus death figures. That’s a weak excuse. When you compare U.S. COVID-19 deaths per capita with those of other democratic countries that don’t lie about their figures, the United States is still one of the countries with the most COVID-19 deaths as a percentage of its population. Pence,
The United States has 62 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with Germany’s 11 deaths per 100,000 or South Korea’s 0.7 deaths per 100,000, according to Johns Hopkins University figures.
- Trump minimized the pandemic from the very start and his administration was slow to order the face masks, respirators and other medical equipment that would have been crucial to reducing America’s COVID-19 death toll.
As late as Tuesday’s presidential debate, Trump had mocked Biden for wearing face masks most of the time, saying that, “I don’t wear masks like him.” On April 3, Trump said that wearing masks “is voluntary. You don’t have to do it . . . I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”
- More than 7 million Americans got infected with COVID-19, and more than 208,000 have died from it. The pandemic was starting to become the new normal and was fading from front-page headlines in recent weeks, overshadowed by bombshell headlines about Trump’s taxes and revelations from tell-all books from his former close aides.
But now, even if Trump makes a complete recovery, many Americans many Americans who had followed Trump’s “guidance” during the pandemic will ask themselves some hard questions.
Until recently, many of them were saying, “If the president doesn’t wear a mask, why should I?” Now, many of them will ask themselves, “If the president got the virus despite getting daily COVID-19 tests and round-the-clock medical attention, how safe can I be?”
The pandemic is back at center stage. That’s bad news for Trump, and for Pence if he were to take his place.
Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show at 8 p.m. E.T. Sunday on CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera
