When a Narcissist in Chief Meets a Global Pandemic
Donald Trump is still not taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously. And I don’t mean he isn’t anxious about it, or that he’s still pretending it’s a hoax perpetrated by Democrats. He’s turned the corner on that, because even those of his supporters who favor aluminum headwear are beginning to see irrefutable signs that COVID-19 is real and spreading.
But he does not, in any meaningful sense, understand the gravity of the problem. Or he is willfully ignoring it in a haze of narcissistic magical thinking, the radius of which extends to much of the executive staff. He demonstrated this on Wednesday when he put his xenophobic senior adviser Stephen Miller and his expertise-free son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of developing and articulating the White House’s response to the pandemic, which he delayed announcing until it had Kushner’s seal of approval.
Neither Kushner nor Miller has any expertise on pandemics, emergency response, or anything that would qualify either of them to be involved in that process on an even cursory basis. I am particularly sensitive to Kushner’s woeful inadequacies on this front because I’m a former editor-in-chief of a newspaper he owns, and he was once my boss, back when he was nominally a Democrat and his father-in-law was still pretending to fire people on TV. I’ve written about what he was like to work for elsewhere. The short version is that Jared Kushner is incurious, not inclined to defer to experts, and surrounds himself with yes men, so he is unaccustomed to being told that his decision-making is bad. He believes his capabilities far exceed what they are, and his assessment is reinforced by the people around him who are paid to tell him that. In this sense, he is not unlike his father-in-law. And we now know that his “research” consisted in part of asking Kurt Kloss (the father of his sister-in-law, supermodel Karlie Kloss) to crowdsource recommendations on Facebook, a platform better known for distributing decontextualized memes and misinformation than expert knowledge.
Miller, for his part, has no ostensible expertise in anything except injecting racism into any policy the White House puts out and writing speeches that display the rhetorical mastery of the average seventh-grade book report. His signature contributions to the administration are consistently advocating for cruelty to immigrant children and promoting white nationalism from the Oval Office. He has been one of the few Trump advisers to stick around over the course of Trump’s term, but it’s easy to see why: There’s no moral bar too low for Miller to limbo his way underneath. His entire purpose in the administration appears to be to translate xenophobia into executable public policy.
If the White House regards Miller and Kushner as the smartest guys in the room on this issue, it says less about their intelligence than the state of the room. Addressing a pandemic is a Herculean effort even in an administration staffed with competent experts, which is not the one we have. It requires specialized knowledge, an understanding of epidemiology and large-scale emergency response, and real experience in dealing with outbreaks. Trump has rejected all of those things and the people who might offer them, and instead has deferred to the amateur analysis of Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, with oversight from senior pandemic amateur Vice President Mike Pence, whose only prior experience handling a viral outbreak resulted in a catastrophic increase in HIV in Indiana.
All of this is intentional because Trump cannot or will not wrap his addled brain around the idea that this is anything more than a political problem. We saw this in his speech on Wednesday. He looked uncomfortable, nervous, even, as he read with some difficulty, what Miller and Kushner had written for him. In the course of the speech, he insinuated that China was responsible for the virus, an inevitability given Miller’s bigotry, and instituted a partial travel ban for people coming from Europe. These racist dog whistles, like much of what Trump communicates externally, are designed to signal to parts of his base that their own xenophobia is justified and that the disastrous response to the pandemic so far can be pinned on people who are not American, and not white, and most importantly, not Trump.
This is more of the same for Trump. He is only ever speaking to his base, because the base gives him validation, and he thinks he will get re-elected via the racist playbook he used in 2016, demonizing immigrants and trumpeting policies that hurt people of color. He puts amateurs in charge of things that require expertise because he disdains expertise generally (it makes him feel dumb) and is narcissistic enough to believe that he can personally achieve anything without it.
Most importantly, he is too selfish and cloistered from the real world to have any meaningful sense, or feeling, of responsibility for the public good, because he cannot view anything that’s happening through the lens of anything except his personal interests. This means that he cannot respond in the public interest to anything so big or high-stakes as a pandemic. In his mind, there is no public interest that exists outside of his own personal needs and wants.
As a result, the White House response on Wednesday addressed none of the public’s primary concerns or needs, most of which center on the lack of testing for COVID-19 and the commensurate lack of information about how widespread the virus is. The speech was self-congratulatory and included several statements about the travel ban that had to be walked back by the administration the very next morning, causing chaos in international airports and further damage to markets, in the worst plunge for the DOW since 1987’s “black Monday” and the fourth worst day in the 124-year history of the index.
It’s easy to imagine an alternate universe where the president is reasonably competent and has a sense of public service, because for the most part, we’ve been historically spoiled with presidents who display some degree of both (or at the very least, a response as competent as that of our global democratic peers.) In that alternate reality, the president would have addressed an anxious nation with answers to their most pressing questions, and a plan to keep Americans safe and healthy inasmuch as we are able. This would, by necessity, begin with and revolve around widespread testing. The president would have surrounded himself with experts, listened to them, and deployed the full resources of the agencies designed to deal with emergencies on this scale, none of which would be hamstrung by partisan budget cuts and understaffing. He would not have relied on the mediocre intellect and amateur opinions of his unqualified son-in-law and in-house xenophobic scaremonger to produce a set of recommendations.
And perhaps most unlike Trump, the hypothetical president would have modeled a sense of civic duty, instead of one pathetic line demanding bipartisan unity after nearly three years of stoking partisan divisions from the comfort of the Oval Office. He would have inspired people to look out for their neighbors by practicing social distancing in order to protect the vulnerable, and conveyed the importance of being responsible for fellow Americans because we really are all in this together.
But he doesn’t fundamentally believe that, and in the past 24 hours, we’ve seen plenty of evidence that Trump isn’t even doing things conducive to flattening the curve—or slowing the spread of the virus in order to avoid overwhelming our health-care system—himself. He’s still planning to hold rallies and has been seen at recent events with people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19. Yet the White House is saying he doesn’t need to be tested, and is basically ignoring most of the precautions Americans are being asked to take, often at great sacrifice, for the good of the whole. The whole is an abstraction to him, and a meaningless one. He cannot take it seriously because he’s too solipsistic to conceive of a crisis of public health as anything but a variable that might affect the stock market and, by extension, his approval ratings.
His demeanor on Wednesday was subdued—not the bombastic off-the-cuff Trump we usually get in public addresses. The self-aggrandizement was even turned down a notch, if only because the speech was scripted. He looked genuinely frightened. But make no mistake: He’s not frightened for America. He’s frightened for himself. His own fate is the only thing he’s capable of taking seriously.
Elizabeth Spiers is the founder of The Insurrection, a digital strategy, messaging, and polling firm that works with progressive Democrats, and the former editor-in-chief of the New York Observer.
They were an all-star crew. They cooked up the perfect plan. And when they pulled off the caper of the century, it made them more than a fortune—it made them folk heroes.
Originally Appeared on GQ
