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Trump’s Closing Argument on Virus Clashes With Science, and Voters’ Lives

The president has continued to downplay the severity of the coronavirus and declare before largely maskless crowds that it is vanishing. The surge in new cases across the country says: Not so.

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President Trump during a campaign rally in Omaha on Tuesday. He has held multiple rallies each day in different states.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Alexander Burns

• Oct. 28, 2020

As an immense new surge in coronavirus cases sweeps the country, President Trump is closing his re-election campaign by pleading with voters to ignore the evidence of a calamity unfolding before their eyes and trust his word that the disease is already disappearing as a threat to their personal health and economic well being.

The president has continued to declare before large and largely maskless crowds that the virus is vanishing, even as case counts soar, fatalities climb, the stock market dips and a fresh outbreak grips the staff of Vice President Mike Pence. Hopping from one state to the next, he has made a personal mantra out of declaring that the country is “rounding the corner.”

Mr. Trump has attacked Democratic governors and other local officials for keeping public-health restrictions in place, denouncing them as needless restraints on the economy. And venting self-pity, the president has been describing the pandemic as a political hindrance inflicted on him by a familiar adversary.

“With the fake news, everything is Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,” Mr. Trump complained at a rally in Omaha on Tuesday, chiding the news media and pointing to his own recovery from the illness to downplay its gravity: “I had it. Here I am, right?”

Earlier the same day, Mr. Trump ridiculed the notion that the virus was spreading rapidly again, falsely telling a crowd in Lansing, Mich., that the reported “spike in cases” was merely a reflection of increased testing. The 74-year-old president pointed to his teenage son, who was diagnosed with the virus earlier this month, to suggest that many of those cases were of only trivial concern.

“Do you ever notice, they don’t use the word ‘death,’ they use the word ‘cases’?” Mr. Trump said. “Like, Barron Trump is a case. He has sniffles, he was sniffling. One Kleenex, that’s all he needed, and he was better. But he’s a case.”

As a political matter, the president’s approach amounts to an Obi Wan-like attempt to wave his hand before the electorate and tell voters that they are not experiencing a pandemic that is tearing through their neighborhoods and filling hospitals. His determination to brush aside the ongoing crisis as a campaign issue has become the defining choice of his bid for a second term and the core of his message throughout the campaign’s endgame.

There is considerable evidence it is not working. The stock market, long the focal point of Mr. Trump’s cheerleading efforts, plunged by more than 900 points on Wednesday, suffering its worst drop in months as investors grappled with the mounting disruptions wrought by the pandemic. Polling and interviews with voters show that most are not inclined to trust Mr. Trump’s sunny forecast.

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Mr. Trump’s description of the disease is ungrounded in fact, and his theory of countering it has clashed with the preferences of medical officials at every level of government. The country has reported more than 8.8 million cases of the coronavirus, including a 39 percent increase in new cases over the last 14 days. More than 227,000 Americans have perished from the disease.

In Bullhead City, Ariz., on Wednesday, Mr. Trump promised voters that a vaccine would be available “momentarily,” though scientists and pharmaceutical companies say no such breakthrough is assured. Using a phrase that has become a refrain for him at rallies, he insisted the country was “rounding the turn” on the virus.

In the states Mr. Trump is visiting, his presence can stir as much anxiety as excitement, as voters fear the impact of large public gatherings.

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A voter cast his ballot early in Minocqua, Wis. The state reported record totals for new cases and deaths from the coronavirus. Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Allison Drennan, an independent voter from Gastonia, N.C., said she was voting for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, in part because of Mr. Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus. Last week, she was dismayed to see that Mr. Trump was holding a rally in her area, because it had the potential to help spread the disease.

“I think it’s a huge mistake,” Ms. Drennan, 29, said of the rally, citing specific details about the local impact of the pandemic. “We have 77 people in our hospitals in Gastonia with Covid already. I’ve decided I’m going to self-isolate to the extent that I can for the next two weeks.”

The numbers in North Carolina support her inclination toward caution. While the state has managed to keep the disease more contained than some other large states, its average daily case count has risen by 13 percent over the last two weeks. There have been more than 266,000 cases in the state, with a death toll of 4,269 as of Wednesday afternoon.

Ashley Narten, 37, of Minocqua, Wis., lost her job as a waitress for five months this year when her restaurant cut back shifts. When she finally went back to work in September, she got the virus herself.

After completing quarantine, she took her young sons to see her cast a ballot for Mr. Biden. She said she was deeply pessimistic about the trajectory of the pandemic.

“I just don’t know how we can live and have an economy while it’s going around,” she said.

In Wisconsin, which on Tuesday reported record totals for new cases and deaths, a Marquette University Law School poll published Wednesday showed that 58 percent of voters there disapproved of the president’s handling of the pandemic. Mr. Biden was leading Mr. Trump in the crucial state by five percentage points.

Like much else about Mr. Trump’s mode of leadership, his view of the pandemic has found an enthusiastic audience from a minority of the country. A national poll published recently by The Times found that nearly two in five voters agreed with Mr. Trump that the worst of the crisis was over. The president’s push to fully reopen the economy is not without appeal, at least to the voters who already support him, and they have remained loyal through various personal and political scandals, policy breakdowns and an impeachment trial.“