Thread by @dynamicsymmetry

Okay, I should be working on the book I’ve spent the last couple of days neglecting because what happens when I enter a semi-manic phase is that I have a lot of energy but only for stuff I shouldn’t be doing. But I do want to talk about this.

Trump, PR, and narrative: a Thread

So by now Trump has made it *abundantly* clear that he’s only concerned about coronavirus/COVID19 to the extent that it affects him and his re-election chances. No surprise there; anyone who’s been watching the last three years could have predicted he’d prioritize that way.

He’s worried about the numbers, mostly, because I think numbers are a thing he doesn’t really understand on any deeper level but are at least concrete and right in front of him. And he knows that while sometimes bigger is good and smaller is bad—

—in this case, bigger is bad and smaller is good. He does grasp that. And he not only grasps that; it’s pretty much *all* he grasps, other than a nebulous sense of what does and doesn’t make him look bad.

But what’s interesting to me is actually how poorly he grasps that.

I want to issue a caveat: I’m going to be talking about this in a way that’s going to make me sound really cold and callous. I’m sorry about that. I spent years writing about extermination camps; I have a very finely developed sense of emotional distancing.

Sometimes that makes me sound like I don’t care, or that I don’t understand the terrible human cost of things. I do; it’s precisely because I write and talk about that stuff that I write and talk with that cold distance. I gotta.

And I’m also going to be talking about exactly Trump cares about, which is in itself cold and callous: appearances and PR, not human cost. So I’m only going to be talking about real human cost tangentially. Again, not because I don’t care or don’t think it matters.

That caveat issued, I will proceed coldly and callously.

Trump is a TV man, right? He’s obsessed with how things look on TV. His candidacy was built on TV, his primary advisors are all on TV, he examines and understands his presidency through the lens of TV.

He chooses staff based on how they do on TV. His most valued lawyers are TV lawyers. It’s all TV.

Which means it’s all imagery. Think about how the only way his staffers get him to pay even brief attention to his briefings is by including a lot of pictures.

TV to him is best, it’s what he understands and knows best to the extent that he understands and knows anything at all, but we can include pictures in his overall realm of comprehension and interest.

And what he cares about is how those images make him look.

So the thing I’ve been most struck by is how he actually doesn’t seem to have any idea of how the images of this pandemic are going to affect him once they become widespread and truly impossible to control or contain.

Trump is at his most secure when he’s able to direct the narrative. Not *control* it, really, because very little about the narrative of this presidency has been controlled in any real practical sense. But that’s fine; he’s not the control candidate, he’s the chaos candidate.

What he does do pretty effectively is *direct* the narrative. He’s good at distraction. He can’t stop scandals, but he can use new scandals to distract from the old scandals, and he can assault the very notion of truth or a shared informational universe.

His weakest moments have been the ones where external forces came together in such a way that nothing he could do affected the narrative in any way that benefited him, in terms of distraction or anything else.

We haven’t had many of those.

Because we haven’t had many of those, he hasn’t had to formulate any strategies for handling them when they happen. The best he and the WH do is batten down the hatches and hope it goes away.

COVID19 is not going to go away.

Just about everything else has gone away! Eventually!

By the way, this is why I’m pretty sympathetic to the people who were arguing that the House should just hold endless hearings without ever sending articles of impeachment to the Senate.

Just flood the news and the TV screens with hearing after hearing after hearing and terrible thing after terrible thing. People might have eventually become numb to it, it might have backfired, but we’ll never know.

The point is, he didn’t control the hearings.

The impeachment hearings were a *bad* time for him, because he didn’t control the narrative, Republicans weren’t able to do much to help him because they didn’t control the House, and every day new shit was flying at him.

And it was on TV, so it was powerful. Yeah, Fox and the GOP were able to do what they could do in terms of packaging sound bites and clips for the evening shows, but that really only went with far, and it was only ever going to go so far. It was a bad time.

But he battened down the hatches and he weathered it, and eventually it did go away and now basically no one is talking about it anymore.

Whew.

Except now there’s a pandemic, and that’s really something new.

Think it’s worth going back to this thread, which is really good and really scary and really worth reading. I want to go back to it because it’s all about the numbers and what the numbers are likely to do and how fast it’s likely to happen.

https://twitter.com/lizspecht/status/1236095180459003909?s=21

https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/1236095180459003909

Trump is numbers-obsessed, but right now the numbers are small and they aren’t going up *that* fast, so he’s freaking out about a cruise ship. I’m sure people have used words like “million” in his briefings, but I’m betting that’s too much of an imaginative leap for him.

Point is, he is not at all prepared for the kinds of numbers that will probably be coming at him in the next few weeks. Nothing remotely like this has happened to him before. He has never been at the helm for a disaster of these proportions.

Many people have observed that he behaves like a spectator of his own presidency. He watches it on TV and he understands that he’s the star of the show, but he’s also just *watching*. It’s weird, but I think he sees himself as being in charge... but only in a TV way.

Which is to say he gets to be the center of the story and he gets to tell people what to do and have them call him Sir, but he’s never really felt any sense of responsibility—not in the moral sense but in the cause-and-effect sense.

On a reality show he gets to puff himself up and say “you’re fired”, and in his business he gets to order people around, but everyone else always handles the actual work. Someone else directs and produces. Other people handle the contracts.

So far he’s been able to be president by handing the work off to everyone else like he’s always done and do what he prefers to do, which is tell people what to do and be on TV and go golfing. And he’s never been faced with a disaster where people hold him *responsible*.

But now he’s in the middle of the early days of a pandemic, which means he’s in the early days of an event and a story and a narrative and a set of numbers and most importantly *a series of images* that he does not and cannot control.

And those things are going to grow and worsen and change far too rapidly for him to get a handle on, and given that he’s surrounded himself with incompetents and sycophants who actively sabotage the competent people under them, none of them can get a handle on it either.

Let’s go back to the math thread. Think about the numbers it covers. More, think about the pictures those numbers imply. The actual images, the video and the still shots.

I should note before I go on to those that the one thing that even comes close to what he’s dealing with now is what happened to Puerto Rico, where the damage was horrendous, people are still recovering, and thousands died.

Those were bad numbers and images.

But what saved him was distance and racism and a complacent news media. Puerto Rico seems really far away to most people, it’s full of brown folks, and probably a huge number of Americans don’t even know Puerto Ricans are Americans. He sure as hell doesn’t.

And anyway, even brown and Black people right here in the continental US don’t get treated by him or his people or his fans as Americans, so you get your ass people on an island across an ocean don’t matter.

But this is not Puerto Rico.

This is right here. A virus does not racially discriminate (although yeah, poor and disproportionately Black and brown communities will probably suffer way more). Some estimates are that maybe up to 70% of people globally will eventually get COVID19.

I will probably get COVID19. You will probably get COVID19. Almost certainly, if we don’t, someone we know will.

And if it’s as bad as some of the worst but pretty solid estimates have it right now, most of us will know someone who died from it.

Friends and family members will likely die from it. Neighbors and coworkers.

I don’t care how deep you are in Fox News Fantasyland. When something like that is happening, it’s a little hard to believe Hannity when he tells you everything is fine.

And yes, I know that there are some Trump people out there who will believe to their literal dying breath that he’s good and strong and in control. I know that.

But that is not the majority of the country.

Unless some miraculous kind of containment happens, unless God delivers a vaccine from the heavens, COVID19 is going to be all over the place in a matter of weeks. It’s going to be impossible to ignore, and it’s going to be impossible to ignore how poorly it’s being handled.

And even people who like Trump will look to him, and will see that he’s lying and flailing and failing, and they’re going to look at their sick and dying friends and relatives and they are going to have some *wicked* buyer’s remorse. Or that’s what I believe right now.

But let’s go back yet again to the images, because I think the images are going to be fucking things up *real* bad for him long before we all get sick.

The thread I linked to describes a catastrophically overburdened health care system.

Think about what that looks like.

It looks like shaky footage of crowded hospitals full of coughing and raised voices and people running around. Some health care workers in China collapsed on the job from exhaustion and dehydration, so maybe people fallen on the floor.

Cots packing the corridors because there are no empty beds in the rooms. Everywhere people wearing masks. Even before that: footage and pictures of people in scary hazmat suits going into and out of buildings.

Long lines of people waiting for medication.

Maybe some larger areas will have to be quarantined. I don’t know how likely or possible that is, but just think for a second about how it would look if it happened.

Empty streets. The images from China look like an actual civilization-ending event took place.

It didn’t, people are just hanging out in their houses and the worst that’s happening to them is they’re really bored and improvising new games with common household objects.

But it *looks* fucking awful.

And in some parts of the world, people have been collapsing in public from this. They aren’t *dying right there*, they’re just sick and they need to go to the dang hospital.

But it *looks* fucking awful.

I would say I think we can’t really conceive of how the way our world *looks* may change in the coming weeks—but I know most of us can.

Because most of us watch TV.

We watch TV, we’ve seen movies, we’ve played post-apocalyptic video games. We know what it looks like when a really scary pandemic is happening. We see images like we’re probably going to see and we think of burning corpses and mass graves.

And probably that won’t happen! None of those images mean mass death or the collapse of civilization (probably). They just mean we weren’t ready for this and the system is straining under the weight.

Won’t matter. It looks awful.

And before you talk about censorship: no, I don’t think that’s going to work at all, and if they try, that just makes it scarier, because it makes the video shakier and now you have people yelling at people to stop filming and it looks like they’re hiding something *really* bad.

Maybe eventually the news networks will stop showing images, but I think it’ll take a while for that to go into effect if it happens, and you know what news folks love: scary shit and scary images and loud scary chyrons.

This far I think the media has actually done a really good job of being restrained, being sensible, making sure accurate info gets out there and dispelling myths and disinformation.

But those images are still fucking scary, you guys, however reasonable the coverage.

I actually really hope people remember that just because it looks scary, that doesn’t mean we’re all going to die. We’ve been primed to find images like we’ll probably see really really scary and associate them with worst case scenarios, but that doesn’t mean those are happening.

But Trump. Oh, Trump. So worried about his numbers and how things look on TV, and he really doesn’t seem to have any idea of what’s bearing down on him and what it might do to him.

This is supposed to be what he’s *good* at.

I really wonder what it’s going to do to his brain if and when it truly hits him that what’s sliding out of his control is how things *look*.

People will tell him case numbers and death tolls but I don’t think anything will fuck with him the way that will.

He’s not ready. We’re not ready for the strain on the systems we rely on every day, but he’s not ready for the PR shitstorm, and there is absolutely nowhere he can hide from it, no way he can misdirect.

One thing he *might* do, which I’ve seen other people suggest and I think is really possible if not probable, is pull out the tried and true old racism-disease card and try to use this to make his white people even more scared of brown people, which has worked before.

But you know, that’ll be horrible and we’ll have to be ready to do whatever we can to protect vulnerable people, but I’m just not sure how well that will work here. Maybe it will, but I wouldn’t be certain about it.

Another thing he might do is claim this is some kind of Democrat bioweapon released to make him lose reelection. I mean, that would be bad, and enough people with guns might believe it that it could cause some real damage, but yeah.

The one thing I’m most worried about is him postponing/canceling the election if his poll numbers look bad enough. I think we need to be considering that as a real possibility.

But he’ll be taking extreme measures like that because he’ll feel like those are the only ones he has.

Man, like I said I sound really callous and cold and I’m sorry about that, but the part of me that decided to do a doctoral dissertation on extermination camps because I think they’re interesting is *fascinated* to see where this goes.

Because of him. Because he’s never had to face anything like this. Because he’s not ready. And because the thing that might hurt him most is the thing which, up until now, he’s considered his greatest asset, even pretty much all he considers real.

I don’t want to say with any confidence that this could cost him the election, because that sounds kind of ghoulish even for me but even more because there are just so many variables flying around so quickly that I don’t think we have any way of predicting with much certainty.

But the one thing I feel really comfortable predicting is that he’s not ready for what he will probably feel like is his best friend turning on him.

And he’s supposed to be good at TV.

And he could make the images better, by doing what places like South Korea are doing: putting the best people in charge, hurling money at them, remaining calm, making getting a handle on the size of the problem the biggest priority, and focusing on shoring up strained systems.

But *because* he cares about appearances and PR so much, he won’t do any of that.

It’s like a Greek fucking tragedy, except it’s real and real people will suffer for his foolishness and incompetence.

But yeah. That’s what hits me. It’s his own best weapon turning on him, and he won’t see it coming.

I mean, probably. All of this is only what I imagine is likely to happen, could be completely wrong, and obviously we want this to not be that bad.

For us, I guess I just want us all to try to remember that even if it *looks* fucking awful on TV, that doesn’t mean it’s as bad as it looks.

As in this isn’t The Walking Dead or The Stand or whatever.

It just really really sucks.