Trump’ing reason

Commentary by José Álvares

Trump knows well that re-tweeting a call (note, with incorrect supporting arguments) to fire Fauci, an expert who served 6 US presidents and has been a voice of sincere trust with the American public, will lead to appalling reactions. Yet, such aggressiveness caters well to his base which has been giving him a bump in some polls, highlighting the current divide in American politics and which is in stark contrast with his objectively poor performance.

Navarro, one of Trump’s top advisors, in late January wrote a memo (something Trump apparently doesn’t fancy reading) on the potential catastrophic consequences if the COVID-19 spread in the US. To be fair, on January 31, Trump did ban entry to anyone who had been to China in the past 14 days (as the first case in the US had been confirmed on January 21).

However, for the whole of February, Trump energetically spent his time assuring people that the situation was under control as, quote, “heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus” and that the 15 people infected at the time “would recover”, and “within a couple of days [the number] is going to be down to close to 0” – yes, a lot of zeros, around five of them in a six digit figure..

Then the finger-pointing game started, first by repeating the designation “Chinese virus”, which he later implicitly acknowledged was damaging to the Asian-American community - or to a potential pool of 5 percent of votes (some of which had recently been veering towards the Republicans). More recently, it was the WHO’s time to get the end of the stick, all in the name of diverting blame from Trump’s own shortcomings in this crisis.

While the UK prime minister had initially taken a similar approach (including bragging about greeting infected people), he emerged from a humbling “visit” to the intensive care ward with a different speech, interestingly complimenting two (foreign) nurses – by the way, immigration doesn’t seem so bad after all, does it Boris.. Brazil’s Bolsonaro had also a blatantly arrogant approach, fortunately tempered (though with friction) by his – meanwhile fired – health minister People nowadays have much better access to information (although there are numerous amounts of fake news) that enable them to make more fact-based judgements (which, however, doesn’t mean that the result is always right).

It would thus seem incoherent then that those same leaders demand satisfaction from others (surely, from a political point of view, to their electorate, they need to be perceived as blameless). Calls for compensation from China are nonsensical - the origin of the virus hasn’t been proven (and certainly there was no intentional spread as seen from the strict lockdown measures) and, moreover, most countries had weeks and some even months of heads-up. Having seemingly come out of this crisis earlier than others, by supplying or donating medical equipment all around the world, China has been working hard to make up for the negative impression it initially earned. Reality is, it’s nearly impossible to predict this type of crisis (timing and extent wise), so it’s more about how to react to the same (Bill Gates did ominously warn civil society about our unpreparedness).

While many of us remain confined to four walls with limited personal contact with other human beings, our instinct is to turn to social interaction which is facilitated through the wonders of technology. It shows our innate willingness to coexist with others and that we are all in the same boat. We need global leaders that prefer compromise over division, and empathy not animosity. One conclusion is clear, had we responded together in this crisis (for instance, all adopting movement restrictions simultaneously), we might not be in such a mess.