Donald Trump has said so many incomprehensibly dumb things over the course of his presidency that it's easy to look at his Axios interview with Jonathan Swan and think, yep, just another notch in the belt girding Trump’s blubber.
From wondering aloud if injecting disinfectant could cure coronavirus to musing about "very fine" neo-Nazis to Sharpie editing a hurricane path, Trump's latest blunder is always mystifyingly more stunning, tragic, and sometimes tragically hilarious than the last. But Trump's interview with Swan, coming at a particularly fraught moment for both the country and Trump's reelection campaign, has the very real possibility of rising above the fray to become more than just another mortifying moment for Trump.
Just last week, the Trump campaign had halted all TV advertising to reevaluate its strategy and messaging. The cessation came on the heels of Trump's supposed pivot toward a more somber tone on the coronavirus. Trump maintained that pivot for all of about two days before he started spouting quack science and retweeting demon sperm doctors of questionable pedigree.
But perhaps more importantly, the campaign's attempted pivot was likely a response to internal polling showing the same public sentiment reflected in this week's NPR/Ipsos survey.
Americans are growing desperate for a nationally coordinated coronavirus plan—including 85% supporting government funding to expand COVID-19 testing and make it free, 83% endorsing federal funding for making an eventual vaccine accessible to all Americans, 62% backing a national plan for reopening businesses, and 60% supporting a national plan for reopening schools.
The American public is scared. It's sinking in that this pandemic is for real and no one is immune to it. The virus doesn't care whether you live in a red state or a blue state, it's looking for tinder in the form of fresh immune systems and advancing wherever it finds them.
That's why Dr. Deborah Birx's CNN interview on Sunday was notable. For Trump's pet medical expert to go on TV and lay down the stark realities of where we stand was likely jarring for some Americans.
“I want to be very clear: What we’re seeing today is different from March and April,” Birx said, noting the virus is now "extraordinarily widespread" in both urban and rural areas. She also declined to swat down one estimate that total deaths could surpass 300,000 people by the end of 2020—roughly double the number that have already succumbed to the disease caused by coronavirus.
Birx's previous failings aside, she didn't mince words Sunday and Trump was quick to deride her as "pathetic."
Trump's campaign already seems to understand that voters want stability—they're looking for someone who can steady the ship. Public polling also suggests most voters get that steadying the economy isn't possible without taming the coronavirus—the two are inextricably linked. If that were not true, all these Sunbelt states that rushed to reopen their businesses would be sitting pretty right now. Instead, they've been facing dire public health realities for weeks now.
But the Trump campaign is also trying to manage a candidate who's taking fistfuls of spaghetti and throwing it against the wall to see what sticks on a daily basis. Their only hope appears to be defining Joe Biden as a flame-throwing member of antifa who's somehow more dangerous than the guy who has presided over the nation's worst public health calamity in at least a century.
But then right there, in the middle of that newly formed strategy, lands images of Trump shuffling through bogus third-grader graphs like a bumbling idiot. "If you look at death, right here, the United States is lowest in numerous categories—lower than the world," Trump says, struggling to interpret a color-coded bar graph.
"Lower than the world?" Swan responds, marveling at Trump's claim. It turns out Trump is talking about death as a proportion of cases, while Swan is referring to death as a proportion of the population.
"You can't do that," Trump responds, puzzling over the hubris of someone challenging him with a metric he clearly wasn't prepared for by his press handlers.
Trump's stupendous ignorance throughout the clip was perhaps only upstaged by the sociopathy of his statement regarding a thousand Americans perishing a day. "It is what it is," Trump blithely told Swan of the death toll.
As one person tweeted, “The image of this old man desperately grasping his giant picture pages as we die will haunt me forever.”
The interview was a tour de force of ineptitude for Trump on the exact topic his campaign had hoped to Etch A Sketch from voters’ minds. His campaign aides can now kiss that effort goodbye.
In a normal campaign season, much of the American public might still be tuned out. People would be vacationing, frolicking, drinking in their last bits of summer. But not now—not with the virus on the move. Instead, the very "suburban housewives" Trump is hoping to woo to his corner are trying to figure out child care amid a pandemic, stressing over whether their school should reopen, and trying to piece together a workaround if it doesn't.
For all those working moms and dads and caretakers of every income level looking for some direction—a North Star to guide them out of this tempest—Trump just shrugged his shoulders and offered, "It is what it is." And for all those families who have already lost a loved one they can never get back, Trump effectively spit in their face.
"We have a leader—and I use the term loosely—who is not providing leadership to this country at all," said Laura Braslow, a Pennsylvania Republican who took part in the NPR/Ipsos poll. Braslow didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and doesn't plan to do so in November. "I mean if I have to suck it up and wear a mask, he should be sucking it up and wearing a mask. He should be showing the American public that this is the right thing to do."
It's one thing when a candidate delivers an unforced error during an interview; it's another when the public is hungering for something and a politician demonstrates their sheer incapacity to fill that need.
That's not an interview that just recedes into the shadow of Trump's next dumpster fire. Rather it's an interview that reinforces everything Trump's campaign is trying to deprogram from the minds of voters.