by Michael Kruse
CHARLOTTE, N.C.— Donald Trump has made a career of turning weaknesses into strengths.
On the eve of Super Tuesday, on a day when Democrats began to coalesce around a suddenly surging Joe Biden and national headlines carried news of four new deaths from the coronavirus, President Trump spent a full six minutes near the start of his hourlong speech at his rally here talking about the good news about what is fast approaching a pandemic.
Some 10,000 people packed Bojangles’ Coliseum to hear him, a sea of red MAGA hats and Keep America Great signs. If experts somewhere in America were worried about the dangers of big crowds, or Trump's own response to the epidemic, it wasn’t in evidence here.
It was clear from the way Trump embraced the subject—his first order of business was to trumpet the stock market’s meteoric one-day rise—that Trump sees the spreading illness not just as threat but as an opportunity. Dinged in recent days for his response to the spread of Covid-19—critics calling it some combination of incompetent, incoherent or dangerously indifferent—Trump answered Monday by stoking the sort of nationalist sentiment that’s been so central to his political identity and ascent. Anxiety continues to mount worldwide as the number of affected countries—and the number of cases—continues to climb. But even on a day when four more deaths were recorded in Washington state, Trump used the crisis to renew a fight on an instinctually comfortable front. Instead of pretending it wasn’t real, a manufactured hoax by Democrats to make him look bad, Trump called it “a problem,” but one that highlighted his administration’s signature policy.
“We’re doing everything in our power to keep the sick and infected people from coming into our country,” he said.
“There are fringe globalists who would rather keep our borders open,” he said.
“No country,” he said, “is better equipped than America to handle new threats, and no people are more skilled, talented, tough or driven than Americans—Americans—and together we are in the midst of the great American comeback.”
The coronavirus and its contribution to last week’s precipitous stock market tumble underscored the risk it still might pose for Trump as the electioneering of 2020 only intensifies. Who knows how the virus, which experts estimate kills up to 2 percent of the people infected, will affect the country? A widespread death toll or a sputtering economy could hobble the president’s reelection prospects. But Trump, of course, is and always has been a wizard of spin, a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale who believes reality can be bent to one’s will based on the stubborn insistence of assertion. “He knows of no other way,” New York gossip columnist George Rush once told me, “and that is to spin until he’s woven some gossamer fabric out of garbage.”
Yet can he spin his way out of a potential pandemic?
“With his base,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell posited Monday in a text message exchange, “yes.”
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