{A} fter his win in the New Hampshire primary, all but assuring that he will be Republican Party’s nominee for the third consecutive presidential election, Donald Trump has to be rated one of the most enduring and creative political figures in American history.
He towers over our era with his ability to command a major American party. He drives his enemies mad and makes many of them rich at the same time. He inspires wall-to-wall news coverage that is similar in tone to that offered in fictional depictions of a hostile alien invasion of Earth. His rise to power coincided with a trend in America by which larger and larger groups of people primarily defined themselves by their political proclivities. (Sociologists have now found that people who identify as conservative Republicans are likely to identify as Evangelicals, too, even if they don’t go to church.)
I perfectly understand why voters may make him president again: the border crisis, inflation, the need to continue to humiliate if not dismantle certain high places of progressive domination of the permanent government.
Many people can be forgiven for resenting that the last eight or so years of American life have been all about him even more than they have been about the problems he was originally chosen by voters to address — as will be at least the next several months.
I do.
But my reluctance to get back on the Trump train has to do more than anything else with the one period during the last eight years when he seemed absent: the spring and summer of 2020.
Trump’s election plan — call off the trade war with China and send stocks soaring — crashed and burned in the first quarter of that year, as China unwittingly set off a global pandemic that shut the U.S. economy down and made Trump look wildly out of touch with not just American voters but his own traditional political instincts.
By May, it was obvious from traffic data alone that many Americans who had dramatically curtailed their socializing in the previous months were starting to venture out again. Trump’s instinct was to “open the country” again. He said in interviews that he hoped to do so by Easter.
But much of the country was running on recommendations made by the CDC, translated into regulations and restrictions by state health departments. Trump let Dr. Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and other health officials set the terms of American life, in an election year. Often there was the unsubtle hint that the only way out of Covid restrictions was to elect Trump’s opponent. Trump never found a way to put public health back in its box and appropriately limit the purview of a set of experts whose opinions were obviously myopically focused on the disease and ignored other priorities of American life that couldn’t be put on ice for months at a time.
And so Trump receded. Suddenly the “Trump! Trump! Trump!” of cable news gave way to Andrew Cuomo and his brother Chris; to health experts pillorying Governors Brian Kemp, Greg Abbott, and Ron DeSantis for trying to do precisely what Trump would not do — act like statesmen and reconcile the diverse interests of their people in the midst of a crisis.
And then the era of Trump was interrupted by the “summer of George Floyd,” when the nation erupted into a racial reckoning. Public-health officials encouraged people to break the rule against public gatherings of more than ten people — a rule that was zealously applied, for example, to Jews performing funeral rites — in order to protest racial injustice. After all, those health officials concluded, racial equality (unlike the First Amendment) is an important principle that can’t wait for a respiratory pandemic to end.
Trump would tweet about “law and order,” just as in the spring he had tweeted such things as “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.” In June he had law-enforcement officers use riot-control tactics not to end the riots in D.C. but to stage a photo op of himself holding a Bible outside of St. John’s Church.
Go back and look at all the major editorials of the time. I like Abe Greenwald’s “Yes, This Is a Revolution” from the September 2020 issue of Commentary. It tries to summarize the insanity of that summer — the nationwide riots, the way the media cheered rioters on and apologized for them. It opens: “The battle for the survival of the United States of America is upon us.” That’s certainly how it felt to conservatives at the time. This was, for example, a time that inspired a record number of gun purchases by first-time owners, causing ammo shortages that lasted for years.
Do you know who never even rated a mention at this time? Donald Trump. He had been eclipsed. During the two unexpected crises that hit his presidency, he let governors such as Abbot, Kemp, and DeSantis take the fire. He watched cities burn, and he tweeted.
No wonder he wasn’t reelected.