Opinion | Whats With Trump and the Invisible Enemy? – POLITICO

We have to fight that invisible enemy, Trump first said at a March 17 presser. Its called the invisible enemy, and thats what it is: its an invisible enemy, he said in a March 18 video blog. In his March 18 presser, he called it the invisible enemy three times, just in case listeners werent paying attention, and used the phrase every day for the next 18 days, missing only March 25. But he didnt fail to hammer his theme with a pitchmans verve: Nobody could ever have seen something like this coming, he said.

We are learning much about the Invisible Enemy, Trump tweeted on the April 5. It is tough and smart, but we are tougher and smarter. It might have seemed weird for the president to attribute intelligence to a tangle of nucleic acids inside a protein shell coated by a fatty jacket, but theres been a method to Trump weirdness from the beginning. Viewed from the lowest level of cognition, youd have to concede that Trump is right. Viruses are unseeable by the naked eye. And broadly speaking, its fair to apply the metaphor of enemy to a host of hardshipshurricanes, old age, alcoholism, famine, et al. Given Trumps preference for plain-speak over metaphor, youve got to wonder how he came to call coronavirus the invisible enemy. He cant really imagine it an evil apparition out of Harry Potter that sends both the young and old rushing for the protection of a ventilator, can he?

No, he cant. Trumps determination to label the virus an invisible enemy bears all the hallmarks of a branding campaign, one fashioned to shape our attitudes toward the microbe to his liking. By calling the virus invisible, Trump implies that he cant be responsible for its wreckage because who can be expected to see an invisible thing coming? And once the unseeable thing has arrived, there are limits to what can be expected to do about it!

This position, of course, is rot. U.S. intelligence was issuing warnings about the contagion in late November. And George W. Bush, nobodys idea of a bright filament, saw the coming danger lucidly in 2005, when he told the country a new pandemic was an unavoidable certainty. Trump can claim the virus was invisible, but only if he will admit his blindness was self-imposed. As the press has demonstrated again and again, Trump routinely downplayed or dismissed its danger, averting his eyes to the coming cataclysm. Actually, Trump has been inconsistent on coronavirus visibility. On February 27, three weeks before Trump started to brand the virus as the invisible enemy, he saw it clearly enough to assert that, One day its like a miracle, it will disappear. (As long as were charting Trumps fluctuating vision, let it be noted that at his March 17 presser he asserted that, I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.)

Trumps determination to brand the virus as an enemy, rather than a pathogen, pays political benefits. Calling his crusade our big war and directly enlisting the military in the fight allows Trump to frame a public health crisis as a military operation: He is the commander in chief, we are his foot soldiers, our patriotic duty is to obey him, and the entire planet is his battleground. This, too, is rot. You cant bomb a virus into submission or bayonet it to death, as Will Bunch recently wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, attacking Trumps use of military symbolism. The virus isnt attacking us like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. It cant be corralled by diplomacy. Its just a mindless biological process doing what biological processes doself-replicate. All this saber-rattling might enthuse Trumps base, but it does zilch to create a vaccine or an effective therapy.

Id like to say that Trumps coronavirus branding campaign has flopped like his attempts to sell overpriced, mail-order steaks that carried his name, that the pubic is too shrewd to embrace his self-serving metaphor. But I cant. Other Republicans have adopted the phraseSecretary of State Mike Pompeo, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantisand so too have Democrats, including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. Even Boris Johnson, summoning his inner Churchill, repeated the phrase before the virus sent him to the ICU.

Whether politicians are imitating Trump to flatter him or because they share his mystic, military mindset I cant say. But either way, Trump has succeeded in getting others to view the invisible thing the way he views it. The crisis has also prompted Trump to declare himself a wartime president, which conveniently places him in the pantheon with genuine wartime presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who expanded the powers of their office. If war is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote, the invisible enemy of coronavirus may prove to be the health of Donald Trump.

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Bournes immortal quotation was rescued from a wastebasket by his desk after his death. Send throwaway quotations to [emailprotected]. My email alerts have called my Twitter feed a very risible enemy. My born-again RSS feed is also self-replicating.

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Opinion | Whats With Trump and the Invisible Enemy? - POLITICO