Character in the Time of Coronavirus

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

One of the maddening things about the U.S. government’s tardy, inadequate, and incompetent response to COVID-19 is that it was the result, in part, of an unnecessarily stupid political calculation. Donald Trump spent 2016 sneering at the idea that the performance of the stock market during the Barack Obama years indicated anything about the quality of the Obama administration’s economic policies; he spent much of his presidency up until a couple of weeks ago boasting about the performance of the stock market during his own administration, arguing that it illustrates the excellence of his administration’s economic policies. He spent the early days of the COVID-19 crisis treating it as though it were principally an economic challenge and spent his time trying to “tweet the markets back to life,” as my National Review colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty put it.

That’s not exactly working out: On Monday, trading was halted one minute after the market opened and the Dow plunged 2,250.

Set aside, for a moment, the more substantive question of how the government’s early nonchalance will shape events in the next few months and consider the pure political malpractice of that. Rather than try to bluster through, the president could have said, “There’s a potentially serious new epidemic under way in China, one that involves a virus we haven’t seen before in humans. We are beginning a full national mobilization in response to it. It may turn out to be nothing, in which case we will have spent a few million dollars on a pretty good dry run of our epidemic-response capabilities. That’s a good investment. There isn’t anything to panic about, but we’d rather err on the side of caution than err on the side of inaction. Now, here’s . . . Mike Pence.”

All right, I might strike that last sentence.

I have been banging away since 2016 on this point: “I preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton” is a perfectly defensible position — but it is not the end of the conversation. It matters whether Trump is capable, competent, and honest. It matters whether he is trustworthy and whether he is understood to be trustworthy. Likewise, if you are on the other side this time around, or if you are a lifelong Democrat, then “I prefer Joe Biden to Donald Trump” is also a perfectly defensible position — but it is not the end of the conversation. It matters whether Biden is capable, competent, and honest. However the argument works out for you, it is important to go into this with eyes that are clear and wide open.

And if you happen to be a journalist or commentator who is holding your fire on one politician or another because you are afraid that you might tilt some voter the wrong way by saying what you actually think — by telling the truth as best you can — then you are in the wrong line of work.

You’re probably overestimating your influence, too. But that is not what this is really about: This is about pledging allegiance.

One of the tragedies of our current mob-populist model of politics is that elevating presidents and presidential candidates to the status of tribal totem makes it virtually impossible to take intelligent countermeasures against them. Republicans have been abject in the face of Trump, of course, but the same dynamic holds sway on the other side of the aisle: Democrats went to the mattresses to defend Bill Clinton from the consequences of actions that would have cost him his job if he had been a junior executive at an office-supply company in Scranton, and not only defended but encouraged and celebrated Barack Obama’s extraconstitutional adventures and the criminal misconduct of his administration in the matter of the IRS targeting the administration’s political rivals. (After lamenting that the PATRIOT Act might enable Dick Cheney to go snooping around your library records, Barack Obama discovered, to his surprise, that he had the power to unilaterally order the assassination of American citizens and then proceeded to do so, which was met, inexplicably, with a bipartisan yawn.) Trump was not wrong about shooting people on Fifth Avenue.

Mitt Romney was (and daily is) savaged for voting to impeach Trump. A few nutjobs with radio programs suggested that he should be prosecuted for treason over that vote. (The boundary between late republic and early empire is a little blurry.) If Mitch McConnell were a bolder man (his caution is usually commendable), and if he wanted to see the president change his ways, he might have orchestrated a narrow acquittal or even a formal censure as a matter of partisan hygiene and institutional self-defense. But, of course, in the contemporary political climate, with its endless loyalty oaths and ceremonies of ritualistic praise for the Big Kahuna, such a thing would have been politically difficult, and Senator McConnell is not a man who normally makes trouble for himself. (He has a great gift, an underappreciated one, for making trouble for others.) If the Senate majority leader cannot act, who can?

A few weeks ago, I spent some time with some Republicans of the sort upon whom Christianity “sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.” They made the usual noises — “We don’t approve of the tweets, and the dishonesty, and the boorishness,” though they were awfully circumspect on the question of how such disapproval might be registered, and were, of course, a good deal less circumspect on the question of Mitt Romney, whose eternal damnation they gleefully anticipated. The ordinary, traditional questions of democratic politics — How do I get this politician to do what I want? — were of no interest to them at all, their only concern being fealty to the idol and casting out the infidels.

As I have argued for some time now, the self-proclaimed realists, pragmatists, men of the world — the sort of people who are always going on about how “government should be run like a business” — are as wrong as they can be about Trump and the character issue. It is not some lofty, rarefied concern for philosophy seminars. It has practical, urgent, day-to-day consequences that we ignore at our now literal peril.