As Donald Trump gazed out over 1,500 mostly maskless attendees at his nomination acceptance speech Thursday sitting no more than 12 inches apart, he assured Americans his administration had a firm handle on a pandemic that has already claimed north of 180,000 lives.
"To save as many lives as possible we are focusing on the science, the facts and the data," Trump said as the gathering he hosted flouted nearly every single data point known about preventing the spread of coronavirus.
"We are aggressively sheltering those at highest risk, especially the elderly, allowing lower-risk Americans to safely return to work and to school," Trump continued, completely ignoring the fact that the pandemic ravaged nearly every state that reopened at his behest (Florida, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, in particular). The same phenomenon is taking place at schools and universities across the country. Just like many states where economic reopenings fueled coronavirus surges, recently reopened schools are now grappling with closing or shifting to remote learning almost immediately due to outbreaks.
"We want to see so many of those great states be opened by Democrats," Trump added, urging, "We want them to be open. They have to be open. They have to get back to work. They have to get back to work, and they have to get back to school."
Thus, in the span of about 30 seconds, Trump went from "following the science" to gaslighting the country about a safe "return to work and to school" and ordering Democratic lawmakers to "get back" to business as usual without precondition. The stanza encapsulated the entire Republican convention's approach to the pandemic response that Trump has bungled from the very start—assert competence, project the myth of normalcy, and then claim the threat over.
Trump knows his abysmal handling of the pandemic is his biggest electoral weakness. A CNN/SSRS poll last week found that 68% of Americans are embarrassed by the U.S. coronavirus response, and Trump's disapprovals on handling of the crisis had reached an all-time high of 58% in the poll, with just 38% approving. While those approvals seem ridiculously high, they would still spell defeat in any election where the country was voting on coronavirus alone.
And yet, Trump and his campaign deliberately chose to offer voters more of the same cognitive dissonance they have been serving up since the very outset of the crisis. Overall, speaker after speaker either pretended the pandemic never existed or that whatever threat it posed had long since past. Jobs numbers touted by Trump, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, and others either stopped in February, before the effects of the coronavirus resulted in unprecedented job losses nationwide, or counted employment gains while ignoring losses.
The White House's chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, provided one of the starkest examples of the convention's coronavirus revisionism, using past tenses for the virus as if it wasn’t still killing some 1,000 Americans a day.
“It was awful,” Kudlow said. “Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere. But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the COVID virus.”
The vast majority of Americans know differently even if Trump's hardcore base is happily wrapping themselves in the false safety of denialism. The CNN poll found that a stunning 67% of Americans now know someone who has been diagnosed with coronavirus. And many of those Americans are still looking for answers on an issue they see as a major threat to their safety and well-being and that of their families.
One 2016 Trump voter who has long since lost faith in him was reportedly "shocked" to find such little discussion of the pandemic by GOP convention speakers when she read over the news coverage. Mary Vevang Anderson, a 54-year-old suburban mom and salon owner from Minnetonka, Minnesota, represents the exact demographic group Trump must make gains in to make this race competitive.
Vevang Anderson hadn't watched either convention live—which appears to be true of many disenchanted female Trump voters—and she also hasn't committed to voting for Joe Biden. And while she worries about both the pandemic and what she views as chaos in the streets, she doesn't see Trump as the answer to either problem.
“Trump’s lost his moral authority with me. He’s so bombastic and he’s cried wolf so many times,” Vevang Anderson, who has struggled keep her salon afloat amid the pandemic, told the Washington Post. “I don’t even know at this point what he can do to regain my confidence in him.”
Trump's coronavirus revisionism won't win over any of these critical voters even if it brings comfort to his cultists. His only shot at winning back many of these women is to convince them that the protests are a bigger threat than the pandemic. But that also counts on those women forgetting the fact that the chaos they see is actually happening on Trump's watch—that he’s in fact fueling it, intentionally.
Vevang Anderson was wise to that. "She worried about how Trump would respond to the civil unrest," the Post said of her reflections on the Kenosha protests. "She feared he might once again take 'a threatening approach that just ratchets up the violence.'"
