It was the wildest night. Sarah Palin rapping “Baby Got Back” on The Masked Singer straight into coverage of President Donald Trump speaking about a pandemic. Almost simultaneously, Tom Hanks announced he and wife, Rita Wilson, were infected with the new coronavirus. Hanks, “America’s Dad,” perhaps the most loved man in the country and now of a risky age, would have been the choice of every scriptwriter for the role of famous victim, were this a disaster movie rather than real life.
This time Trump seemed convinced it was in fact real life and not a hoax perpetrated by his enemies. He looked despondent and was at times incoherent, but the speech had a powerful, if devious, logic. The Chinese and Italian authorities see the coronavirus as a problem to be solved. Trump sees it as a story to be built. As the story develops, the problem may or may not be solved.
The president miscalculated early in the epidemic. Those who understood from the beginning the seriousness of the problem were the people most familiar with contemporary China. If you believe the country is a combination of Soviet totalitarianism and tropical hardship, the natural inclination is to think that what happens there cannot happen in the developed world. It was a tragic mistake, but Trump was by no means alone in making it.
Last night, as the president considered the first segment of the pandemic story, he was apparently forced to see how the camera is showing him: as the bumbling leader who promises everything is fine while the screen shows the opposite. He needed to regain control of the narrative by introducing a new and dramatic element into the coronavirus story. He decided to argue that everything would indeed be under control were it not for an unexpected “foreign” presence. The Chinese were not available for that role because he had already bragged of keeping them out. The Europeans took their place.
At one point the president actually said the new restrictions would include “the tremendous amount of trade and cargo” coming from Europe. The audience held its breath. For long minutes, until the notion was corrected by the White House, we thought that trade between America and Europe had been interrupted for the first time in four centuries. It was a wild night.
What happens now? Others will argue that by blaming a “foreign virus” for the continued pain and disruption, Trump made it clear that he does not intend to do what really matters: make testing kits available, impose strict measures of social distancing, and, most important, expand emergency care facilities. All of this needs to be done within days, before the situation gets out of control.
I don’t see Trump’s intentions that way. What he needed was a pretext allowing him to pivot to full emergency mode without excessively contradicting his earlier statements. Blaming the Europeans does that. They made the situation worse than it would be otherwise, Trump is effectively saying, forcing his administration to change tack. Alfred Hitchcock called this a MacGuffin, a device necessary to propel the plot forward. I expect to see an active, engaged, and aggressive administration from this moment onward.
Unfortunately, that does not mean we can all take a deep breath. Many in Europe are shocked either by the rhetorical violence of the speech last night or by its cynicism. For both camps, the United States is increasingly a place beyond comprehension. I have talked to officials in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin who are not shy about disagreeing with China, but who shake their heads and complain they cannot agree or disagree with decisions taken in Washington because they simply have no way to understand them. America has reacted to the trauma in Italy and other countries in Europe by suspending travel and sending stock markets crashing. China has taken the opportunity to offer its expertise and some material support, combined with a bold information campaign aimed at winning hearts and minds. Overnight, the world has changed.
One final thought—the one I keep going back to. The coronavirus crisis is arguably the first truly global crisis. Everyone is in this together, experiencing the same fears and emotions, not merely watching the same events. And yet we are each responding to the crisis in our own way. Global cooperation is entirely missing. Worse, the political dynamics have set up a great contest, where each nation or group of nations adopts its preferred approach, taking the enormous gamble that it will prove superior to the alternatives being pursued elsewhere. It is a deadly gamble. Many of these distinctive approaches will inevitably fail, with tragic consequences. If this is a drama, we are far from the final act.
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