Hmm, I’m trying to take @What_Exit 's advice about linking an answer, but i can’t figure out how to include some (or all) of the post I’m replying to here. I may come back and edit it in, or copy it below this post…
Anyway, i originally thought Trump was just in denial or didn’t understand the issues. But then i viewed it all through the lens of “what makes money for Trump”, and everything he did made sense.
Trump makes money when people go on vacation. Anything that prevents people from vacationing cuts into his personal income. That’s why he didn’t want anyone to worry about covid, and downplayed it as much as possible. But if all your friends are dropping dead, you ARE going to worry, so that’s why he ALSO generously funded the vaccine effort and was pro-vaccine when they became available. Because he understood that having less to worry about was in his interest.
My presumption is that Trump was simply playing to his base: the paranoids and conspiracy theorists who insisted that the Covid “panic” was part of a Deep State conspiracy to institute a permanent “state of emergency” and regiment the populace under socialist controls. Trump isn’t intelligent per se but he does have a con artist’s natural instincts for knowing what people want to hear.
Hadn’t he also closed down the program that had been set up to deal with these sorts of things? He was caught unprepared and then he just did what he always does. Find a way to line his pockets.
Occam’s Razor is usually pretty good. Stupid and lazy.
Part of that laziness also involves his typical MO - say something you wish were true and repeat it enough times that it becomes true. It becomes the truth. And that does work - it’s no secret that there is a significant number of people in the country who believe things he has said that are directly contradicted by physical evidence.
The difference in this case is that, as opposed to what people write in history books or how they may vote, a virus doesn’t really care what people believe when it comes to making them sick or killing them, but our national response was heavily influenced by the assumption it would.
So, the end result was a lot of people who were spurred to do and believe some dumb things that were remarkably counterproductive.
I’d speculate that it also was something bad (very bad) happening to the country (and the world) while he was in charge. One of the hallmarks of Trump, and everything he does, is that he an extreme compulsion to portray it as “the best ever,” “perfect,” etc.
Even with strong, effective management of COVID in 2020, it was going to make millions of American sick, and it was going to kill many thousands of them. That is not “the best ever,” and rather than try to make the government response better, he just spun it, and tried to minimize it.
I’d also agree that his lack of understanding of how medicine and epidemiology work, coupled with his obsession with portraying himself as a super-genius on all topics, led to him making dumb statements about treatments (injecting disinfectants, “light inside the body,” hydroxychloroquinine, etc.).
Finally, I think he has always recognized that his base is distrustful of “experts,” and he has always promised them simple answers (“only I can solve”) to very complex problems; thus, he was unwilling to heartily endorse what the actual experts were advising, because it wasn’t what MAGA Nation wanted to hear.
Trump had the same issue that some Communists did in the 1960s: He thought that if he could simply conceal the signs of trouble, that that meant that the trouble didn’t exist.
He thought if he could ignore or squelch the numbers that showed a pandemic’s severity that all could then go on as normal. He also had bad logic - he thought that the state of the economy was what would determine whether he won in 2020, when in fact a strong leadership stance on Covid could have greatly boosted his approval and reelection odds.
If you take into account one of his few accomplishments, fast-tracking covid vaccines, turning around and downplaying the disease only makes sense as a response to his base.
Stupid and lazy is part of it, but I think another part is that Trump is incapable of seeing any issue in any other way than “how does this affect Trump, and how can I use it to further enrich and empower Trump” - and a pandemic can’t be addressed this way. His actions for covid were all reactive and indicated short term thinking at best.
I concur with this. Trump being stupid, lazy, and unable to admit ever being wrong explains most of it. He also has a strong propensity for denial when he hears things he doesn’t like. He’s claimed that global warming isn’t happening, that sea level isn’t rising (or might rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years), and in exactly the same vein, he claimed that COVID wasn’t a crisis and would just go away by itself in a few weeks.
Trump’s propensity for denial was further strengthened by the fact that even he knew that a real epidemic would have a big impact on the economy, thus undermining his popularity and weakening his re-election chances. So during the crucial months when drastic federal action should have been the top priority, Trump continued to deny that COVID was a problem and advised everyone else to do the same. That he was putting millions of people’s lives at risk probably never occurred to him, but if it did, he wouldn’t have cared.
ETA: That was supposed to be a reply to @Little_Nemo. I see what happened there – @puzzlegal was quoting them, and that’s what I replied to.
In more psychological terms, Trump had plan-continuation-bias, aka get-there-itis. He wanted a strong economy and he refused to change his plans even when a highly intrusive new event would have forced any rational person to change.
By analogy, Trump was like an office manager in the Twin Towers on 9/11. He wants his employees to have a highly productive workday (who doesn’t?) But when the airplanes hit the towers, you fucking evacuate and leave the building.
Trump was like a manager who insists that his employees stay in the towers and keep working even as they’re on fire, because he still wants to meet some now-totally-obsolete production quota goal for that day.
Maybe not the main reason, but money was definitely a factor. Trump’s world is commercial real estate. If nearly every company is suddenly making nearly every employee work from home, the need to lease commercial real estate plummets and so does trump’s bread and butter income.
Also, to do anything would have required listening to experts and taking their advice, and since he’s the smartest person in the world he couldn’t do that. Not to mention he would never listen to Fauci.
The early stuff was just him not taking it seriously and not understanding the threat.
But I’m pretty sure he jumped on the anti-mask train because he saw that his supporters were pushing it, and were very angry. He could appeal to the crowd. Plus he would never wear a mask because he thinks it looks weak.
It’s the only way I can make sense of him also being pro-vaccine. He was never really one of those who believed it was all a hoax. He is germophobic, so he wanted a vaccine to protect himself.
That makes sense. And, yet, IIRC, talking positively about the vaccines in his rally speeches (at least back in late 2020) was one of the few things he’s said in those speeches which consistently drew booing and unhappiness from his followers.
Hadn’t he just declared victory at the lie-abundant State of the Union speech (the one where Nancy Pelosi ripped-up her copy, where he gave Rush Limbaugh a medal)? He could not bring himself to admit something bad was happening, or about to happen, as the experts were telling him, and take action any normal leader would have taken (e.g. listening to the experts, or letting them handle the messaging). Nooo! He had to stay the center of attention - no one can message as good as him. So of course he downplayed the risk. Acknowledging risk is weakness.
Agree to all the points made so far: Trump was too lazy, stupid, and self-absorbed to be able to handle something on a level of a pandemic.
One thing to observe about Trump: throughout the pandemic (and, indeed, his entire political career so far) he was constantly grasping for some sort of “magic bullet.” That is, some solution to the problem that would be cheap and easy to institute and would return things to normal practically overnight. He tried to do this with Hydroxycholorquine and Ivermectin, before eventually just deciding to ignore the problem altogether.
Trump is doing this again during the current campaign; his rally blatherings have devolved to the point where “deport illegals!” has become the solution to pretty much every problem facing America. That is, of course, when he is not suggesting implementing tariffs on all foreign goods (including foodstuffs, which is apparently supposed to make the price of groceries go down).