[!@#$%!]

The paranoid style in pandemic politics

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist


When Chris Wallace asked Donald Trump, “How will you regard your years as President of the United States?” Trump didn’t cite a single achievement. Instead, he went immediately into grievance mode, declaring that “I’ve been very unfairly treated, and I don’t say that as paranoid.”

Actually, Mr. President, that is paranoid. But while Trump couldn’t cite any achievements, one thing he has achieved is defining paranoia down.

In another administration it would be a days-long scandal that the president is trying to appoint an insane conspiracy theorist, who claims that the former head of the C.I.A. plotted the president’s assassination, to the #3 position in the Pentagon. These days it barely registered on the news cycle.

But if the Trump administration and its allies, both in Congress and the media, were paranoid before Covid-19, things have gotten much worse over the past few months.

Peter Navarro, the administration’s trade czar, got a lot of grief for his op-ed attacking Anthony Fauci; if you think he did that without a go-ahead from his boss, I have a degree from Trump University you might want to buy. But his claim a few days earlier that Covid-19 was a “weaponized virus” sent by China to hurt the U.S. economy was much crazier, and would have been a major international incident if the Chinese, like everyone else, hadn’t become blasé about insane Trumpist rants.

And what can you even say about people like Rush Limbaugh — who Trump gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom? A few months ago he was calling Covid-19 a hoax, no worse than the common cold, which was being “weaponized” (they do love that word) against his president. Now he says we should emulate the Donner Party, which turned to cannibalism when the going got tough.

There are a couple of reasons the pandemic has amplified the right’s paranoia. One is that it has transformed the electoral landscape. Even in February Trump was generally a bit behind in national polls. But the Electoral College worked in his favor, and as late as April people on Wall Street were sure he would win. Now he’s at a huge disadvantage, for all the right reasons.

Beyond that, however, Trump’s failure on Covid-19 has been so comprehensive, so total, that his supporters can’t process it.

Presidents are often given credit or blame for things they can’t control; except in a time of crisis that includes the economy, which is driven more by impersonal forces and Federal Reserve policy than by the guy who happens to sit in the White House.

But responding to national emergencies is very much the president’s responsibility. Nor can Trump and his supporters credibly claim that he did as well as anyone could have expected: U.S. performance has fallen so far short of what other wealthy countries have managed — we’re dying 10 times faster than Europeans, and we’re going back into lockdown as other countries return to more or less normal life — that it’s hard to make excuses.

Think about what this means if you’re a Trump supporter. To admit seeing what’s right in front of your eyes means admitting that you’ve been a fool: Everything Trump’s critics said, everything they warned about, has turned out to be true, and you were blind to the obvious.

There may be a few people able to face this reality, learn from it, and move on. But most people can’t handle it. Someday they may manage to convince themselves that they never supported Trump in the first place. For now, however, their only recourse is to insist that it’s all lies, that there’s a vast deep state conspiracy to get their hero.

Paranoia strikes deep, especially when it’s all you’ve got.