Be careful. Trump may exploit the coronavirus crisis for authoritarian ends
Donald Trump’s Oval Office address on coronavirus was terrifying because it revealed a man completely unmatched to the moment. Even though he was reading from a teleprompter, the president got the details of his major policy announcements wrong. He attempted no emotional connection with or comfort of the tens of millions of Americans whose lives are being upended by the threat of the disease. He didn’t even have anything useful to say about what his own top scientist has described as America’s “failing” testing regime, which has screened about as many people all year as South Korea does in a day. In a presidency accustomed to lows, this one was quite literally sickening.
Trump had an unusual deer-in-the-headlights quality during his address, seeming to reveal that even he realizes his lie-and-deny operation cannot last for much longer. His allies in the media are busy trying to downplay the virus, but anyone who switches over to a real news channel can see what is happening in Italy, where doctors feel forced to leave the elderly to die and hospitals are struggling to bury the dead. With estimates of the number of Americans who might require intensive care running into the millions and only about 45,000 ICU beds available in the US, similar scenes might soon be playing out at home.
When Trump and his allies can no longer lie or deny, we can expect them to move on to the next phase of their crisis management playbook: attacking their enemies. It is already clear that they intend to interpret the virus not primarily as an existential threat to millions of Americans, but as an existential threat to their own political power. With the markets tumbling and Trump’s re-election suddenly in doubt, it is only a matter of time before the right goes on the offensive. When they do, it won’t be the virus in their sights, but the familiar foes: journalists, experts, blue states, immigrants and people of color.
At this point, the coronavirus pandemic will intersect with Trump’s authoritarian impulses in truly frightening ways. With parts of the country experiencing levels of privation and death rarely seen in peacetime, Trump will feel justified in invoking emergency powers. In a declared state of emergency, the president has extraordinary powers, including the ability to freeze an American’s finances and deprive them of the ability to legally work, to control digital communications, and to deploy the military domestically. Aside from these enumerated items, Trump has repeatedly shown that he anyway believes that there are no legal or constitutional limits on presidential authority.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/14/trump-may-exploit-coronavirus-crisis
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