Notes on the pandemic presidency

By Max J. Castro Last updated Dec 2, 2020

‘…nothing was more fatal to the inhabitants of this city than the supine negligence of the people themselves…’ (Daniel Defoe, A journal of the Plague Year)

Donald Trump has been promoting pandemics from the moment when he stepped off the golden escalator in 2015 and kicked off his campaign:

A pandemic of xenophobia focused on immigrants of color from Mexico, Central America, and Africa (the shit-hole countries), as well as Muslims from anywhere.
A pandemic of anti-Black racism that manifested itself in forms ranging from suppressing the Black vote to encouraging racist extremist groups and urging the police to be more violent.
A pandemic of inequality spearheaded by colossal tax cuts for the ultra-rich and funding cuts to programs that benefit the poor and the middle class, such as food stamps and Medicaid.

Now that it is finally over, we can begin to identify the most salient features of the fatal presidency of Donald Trump. Donald Trump was a minority president from beginning to end.

He lost the popular vote in both elections, by millions in 2016, and by even more millions in 2020.
He never achieved majority job approval in the polls from the electorate. His high-water mark was 49 percent.

Trump’s base of support was narrow: In 2020 Trump won only among one demographic sector, the shrinking white population.

He lost among the fastest growing sectors, including Blacks, Latinos, and Asians.
In 2016, he won the elderly vote. But he lost this growing sector of the electorate in 2020.
Among whites, his support was weakest among young voters, the future electorate.

Trump’s presidency was based on anachronisms and undemocratic institutions.

His message focused on reprising the past when America was supposedly great, great mainly for whites only.
His 2016 victory was secured only through the vagaries of the Electoral College, an undemocratic, anachronistic feature of the U.S. political system.
Among his strongest supporters were opponents of gun control, including enthusiastic backers of the Second Amendment, another anachronism unique to the United States and the main cause of the country’s leadership in gun deaths.

Trump’s rhetoric appealed to the working class through a populist message that promised the return of jobs in factories and mines through protectionist policies.

His actual policies favored the richest sectors of the population through massive tax cuts and corporate subsidies and other pro-business measures.
Trump’s protectionist policies did not deliver the promised re-industrialization and provoked retaliatory actions that hurt a significant number of workers.

Trump’s ideology and policies are implicated in multiple disasters that befell the nation during his tenure.

Climate change denialism can be linked to a sharp increase in forest fires that devastated several Western states.
His presidency also saw unusually frequent and extremely destructive hurricanes and floods that are associated with the warming of the oceans provoked by climate change.

Trump encouraged right-wing and racist violence, which rose markedly during his four years.

Pro-Trump extremists held a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulting in one death and many injured. Trump said there were good people on both sides, but only one side committed murder and paraded with Nazi symbols.
Deadly attacks by Trump-inspired right-wing terrorists killed dozens of people, including Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, Latinos in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso, Texas, as well as smaller clusters of murders in different parts of the nation. These were indirect results of his xenophobic rhetoric.

Trump’s attacks against federal, local, and state leaders who deviated from his laissez-the-virus-faire encouraged serious threats against these officials.

An unsuccessful plot was hatched to murder the governor of Michigan following a long campaign of verbal attacks by Trump on the governor.
The preeminent epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of the many who received death threats after Trump unleashed his wrath against them. The spectacle of one of the country’s leading scientists, awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor by President George H.W. Bush, having to go around with an armed security detail is a travesty conceivable only under Trump.

Trump’s strategy was successful in uniting most whites and right-wingers behind him.

But his tactics provoked an even stronger boomerang among anti-racist whites, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans who turned the election for his opponent, Joe Biden. Latinos came out in droves in Arizona and Blacks in Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia, among other cities, sealing Trump’s fate.
Trump’s racism and xenophobia adversely affected the global prestige of the United States and encouraged racist leaders and fanatics abroad.

Trump’s foreign policy weakened longstanding alliances and defense agreements established by and in the interest of the United States in the wake of the Second World War.

Under the Trump presidency, the United States became an outlier among democratic countries as Trump pulled out of one key agreement after another. Trust in the reliability of the United States sank to an all-time low.
His tilt toward Russia enabled that country to undertake unprecedented aggressive actions, including armed attacks and land grabs against the Ukraine, assassinations against dissidents in Russia and abroad, and efforts to subvert the U.S. elections.
The President, time and again, took the word of U.S. adversaries and tyrants over the assessments of the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus.

The worst disaster that befell the United States, with a toll greater than all the storms and wildfires combined, came with the Coronavirus. His refusal to marshal a coordinated, united national response ensured this country would suffer the highest number of deaths and the worst economic losses of any nation in the world. His lies and deliberate downplaying of the pandemic cost many lives.

The official figure of deaths from COVID was more than 260,000 by late November 2020; a more realistic estimate based on “excess mortality” puts the figure at more than 300,000.
The best predictions are that between 440,000 and 660,000 thousand will die by March 1, 2021.
As Americans went to the polls November 3, COVID was skyrocketing in virtually every state with no end in sight.

All of this begs the question, how did this catastrophic track record yield so many millions of votes for Donald Trump, around 47 percent of the total?

A fulsome analysis requires more space than I have here, even a book that I am already working on. But the short answer is identity politics. A healthy majority of white voters, including white college-educated women, voted for Trump. Since whites easily make up the largest bloc of voters, the election was somewhat closer than it should have been given Trump’s glaring liabilities, personal and political. But an even larger majority of non-white voters voted for Biden, giving him a clear victory in both popular and Electoral College votes.

This was perhaps the purest expression ever of white identity politics trumping everything—life, truth, character, country, competence, science, and reason. The election showed that these things matter less to most white voters than maintaining their historic demographic and political supremacy.