After the walloping financial markets took Monday in belated reaction to spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), Politico wonders whether our acting president’s usual bag of tricks are a match for a black swan event. A pandemic is not the usual kind of chaos (of his own making) in which Donald Trump thrives:
With the possibility of a U.S. outbreak growing by the day, Trump allies and advisers have grown increasingly worried that a botched coronavirus response will hit the U.S. economy. Even Donald Trump Jr. has mused to associates he hopes the White House does not screw up the response and put the president’s best reelection message at risk, said two individuals with knowledge of his comments.
“Trump’s reelection effort is so closely tied to the strength of the stock market and the economy,” said [Stephen] Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and 2016 Trump campaign adviser. “Anything that shakes us off of that pro-growth track is a concern, but I think the view of officials in the White House is that this will be contained.”
“Once the virus is contained, the market will bounce right back,” Moore added.
Good luck with that. Austria and Croatia have confirmed their first cases this morning. Iran has an outbreak and the UAE has banned flights to or from its Persian Gulf neighbor. The International Olympic Committee “estimates there’s a three-month window to decide whether the Tokyo Games can go ahead due to the spread of coronavirus.” The games are set to open July 24.
What contingency plans does the Democratic National Committee have for a Milwaukee nominating convention — contested or otherwise — that ends a week ahead of the Olympic Games? Or for earlier state-level conventions? Watch this space.
Luckily, most cases of the illness are mild. Some are asymptomatic. But spreading even faster are the rumors and misinformation on social media. Axios reports, “The tide of bad information is undermining trust in governments, global health organizations, nonprofits and scientists — the very institutions that many believe are needed to organize a global response to what may be turning into a pandemic.”
Trump’s insistence that the spread is “very much under control” in this country may not age well. It already sounds like something out of Animal House.
The World Health Organization has already posted a “Myth busters” page to stem the spread of misinformation.
More from Axios:
Three main actors are driving misinformation: People trying to inform their friends and family without vetting the information; entities aiming to harm China’s ruling government; and “longer-term actors in the disinformation space that find this an extremely useful vehicle … to undermine trust in governments, NGOs and fact-based media,” [University of Washington professor Carl] Bergstrom says.
That there are recognized “longer-term actors in the disinformation space” undermining trust in governments (and science) elides the fact that Fox News, the President of the United States, and his supporters from the White House to the state house are among the most prominent disinformers. And unlike the Internet Research Agency, they spread misinformation right out in the open.
It would be perhaps the ultimate irony for the Trump administration to be felled like H.G. Wells’s Martians by an unseen virus after all the protests, investigations, and other political weapons, exhausted, have failed.
And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians–_dead_!–slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
“Going viral” takes on a whole new meaning: its original one.
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