What did Donald Trump do today?
He used a nearly month-old poll to say he was doing a good job with a crisis happening now.
The Trump campaign is increasingly worried about the effect of the COVID-19 epidemic on Trump's re-election chances. Even his own son, Donald Trump Jr., has been telling confidants he's worried Trump will "screw up" the response to the outbreak.
Trump's statements in the past week have been mostly self-congratulatory. Almost all of his nearly hour-long press conference on Wednesday was devoted to explaining how well he personally was handling things. Today, Trump tweeted this claim:
No such poll was cited in the online version of the New York Post today. There is a poll with those numbers, however: a Gallup poll with responses between February 3-16.
Among the developments since then:
- Trump replaced the head of the hastily reassembled task force on the outbreak three times and made sure political loyalists set its agenda.
- major American stock markets had their worst week since the 2007-2008 recession, erasing trillions of dollars of value
- Trump gave a rambling press conference where he falsely suggested COVID-19 was no worse than the flu
- Trump's HHS Secretary pointedly refused to guarantee that all Americans would actually be able to afford any future vaccine
- inter-agency confusion led the State Department to overrule the CDC and let infected Americans returning from a cruise ship break quarantine
- major outbreaks were reported in Iran, Italy, and South Korea
- the virus was confirmed to be spreading locally in the United States
- an American who had reason to believe he may have been infected, and followed advice to get himself tested, was billed $3,270
- Trump publicly got COVID-19 and Ebola confused
- the CDC's extremely restrictive guidelines for testing, and its own test kits, were shown to be flawed
- Trump repeatedly insisted there were only 15 known cases in the United States, at a time when there were four times as many as that.
- Trump muzzled government experts from speaking to the public after a senior figure contradicted him on live TV over the development of a vaccine
- the virus was detected among employees at elementary schools and nursing homes
- Americans who have never left the country have begun dying
- Trump's gutting of the very programs intended to help contain disease outbreak came to public attention
In other words, Trump is saying that because Americans trusted him before there was widespread concern and things started going terribly wrong, they must trust him now.
Why should I care about this?
- In a crisis, a president is supposed to do what is best for the country, not worry about his personal popularity.