June 27, 2020

The Virus Rules

How a microbe will decide the 2020 election.

On March 18, at a press conference flanked by high-ranking officials, President Trump described himself as a “wartime president” fighting an “invisible enemy” known as the coronavirus. The president, it seemed, was beginning to reckon with the extent of the economic, epidemiological, social, and psychological damage the pandemic would cause, and to act appropriately. “We must sacrifice together,” Trump said, “because we are all in this together, and we will come through together.”

An anxious populace welcomed the appearance of a strong leader at a time of national emergency. The president’s job approval ratings rose in the following weeks, reaching a high of 47 percent in the Real Clear Politics average on April 1. The gap between Trump and former vice president Joe Biden narrowed to five points.

How long ago that seems. Some 122,000 deaths and tens of millions of lost jobs later, and in the middle of a cultural revolution sparked by the viral video of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, President Trump finds himself backed into a corner. The rhetoric of a wartime presidency is gone. His coronavirus task force is barely visible. In a symbol of declining levels of support among white voters critical to his reelection, attendance at the Keep America Great rally in Tulsa failed to live up to expectations raised by Trump’s own campaign. The president’s job approval rating has fallen to the low 40s. Biden’s lead has widened to 10 points.

There is no shaking the coronavirus. It is the ever-present backdrop against which our national nervous breakdown is taking place. The good news is that deaths have declined to fewer than 1,000 per day. But that number is still higher than the casualties reported by other liberal democracies in Asia and in Europe, and it may rise in the coming weeks. Sclerotic bureaucracies, poor decision-making, and ill communication at every level of government wasted the opportunity to suppress the virus through relentless testing, contact tracing, and quarantine.

By the time testing ramped up to the point where it could become the centerpiece of a suppression strategy, Americans had grown tired of lockdowns enforced throughout the country without regard to local conditions and to basic freedoms, and weary of a public health establishment whose pronouncements — New York good, Florida bad; protests good, yeshivas bad — seemed driven by partisanship and ideology.

The virus exposed racial, ethnic, and class cleavages that inflamed elite opinion and increased demands for social justice. And the economic devastation left an environment permeated by anxiety and filled with bored and unemployed people, some of whom felt as if they had no stake in the system and no reason not to smash things. The civil unrest of the past month has analogues in earlier pandemics. Local, state, and federal leaders met the disorder with the same woolly-headedness, indecision, posturing, and lack of compassion that they have applied to this one.

Trump has tried to reinvigorate his candidacy by resuming a normal schedule. Recently, in addition to Oklahoma, he has traveled to Arizona and Wisconsin, but at each stop he has run up against the agent of his electoral distress: the plague.

The arena wasn’t full in Tulsa because of a justified fear, on the part of some who otherwise would have attended, of participating in a large gathering in an enclosed space. During his monologue the president remarked, as case numbers rose in 29 states, that he had told his team to “slow the testing down please.” The content of his speech to a youth group inside a Phoenix megachurch had to compete with questions over how widely face masks were distributed among the crowd. As the president traveled to Green Bay for a town hall with Sean Hannity, Texas governor Greg Abbott paused his state’s reopening and halted elective procedures at hospitals in four counties.

The spread of the virus results in panic, and the panic results in economic losses, social isolation, and polarized media and culture primed for incitement. That is why 80 percent of registered voters say the country is out of control, why 68 percent say the country is on the wrong track.

What the coronavirus has done is rob President Trump of his ability to control events. The president has a knack for putting his human opponents on their toes, for establishing facts on the ground that are difficult to contest. But the coronavirus doesn’t read Tweets, doesn’t watch television, and doesn’t go away if ignored. It has to be defeated, or endured. America prides itself on having a government of, by, and for the people. But here, today, the virus rules.

Matthew Continetti is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the founding editor of The Washington Free Beacon. For more from The Washington Free Beacon, sign up free of charge for the Morning Beacon email.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.