{UAH} Donald Trump’s legacy is truth decay

By WILL MARSHALL

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

MAY 08, 2020 | 8:22 AM

President Donald Trump speaks during a White House National Day of Prayer Service in the Rose Garden of the White House, Thursday, May 7, 2020, in Washington.(Alex Brandon/AP)

Our country is reeling under the dual onslaught of COVID-19 and runaway unemployment, but there's one person who's willing to give President Trump high marks for handling the situation: Donald Trump. "I think in a certain way, maybe our best work has been on what we've done with COVID-19," he mused in an interview this week.

Most Americans disagree with Trump's generous self-appraisal. "Since March 20, President Donald Trump's net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) for his coronavirus response has dropped 23 points, settling at a new low of minus 9 this week," reports Morning Consult, which tracks public opinion on the crisis daily.

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"The president's failure to maintain public confidence in recent weeks stands in contrast with a number of other world leaders, who benefited from significant approval rating improvements in the wake of the pandemic," Consult adds. Other polls also show that Americans express much more confidence in their governors than in Trump when it comes to combatting COVID-19 and reopening the economy.

The truth is, COVID-19 is fast becoming Trump's Vietnam War — the defining debacle of his presidency. Even more than impeachment, it poses a mortal threat to Trump's reelection in the fall. He and his allies know that, which is why the country should brace for a furious propaganda campaign from Trump, GOP SuperPacs, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republicans' house organ, Fox "News."

It will be a cynical exercise in instant historical revisionism. Trump and his minions will recast his fumbling response to the virus as decisive leadership that saved "millions of American lives." It could have been worse, we'll be told, and that much will be true, because with Trump at the helm it could always be worse.

The polarizing campaign to salvage Trump's reelection prospects will aim at inflaming the sense of cultural and economic victimhood that lies at the heart of his appeal to white conservatives. It will feature his signature tactics of scapegoating and deflection.

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Notwithstanding Trump's early and fulsome praise of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's response to the outbreak, GOP campaigns strategists are assigning China the villain's role. If this provokes even more militant nationalism and anti-American fervor in China, a rising superpower, so be it. For Republicans, what matters is holding onto the White House and U.S. Senate, by any means necessary.

The president also has declared his intention to suspend all immigration into the United States, thereby conflating even legal immigrants with the "Chinese virus" as foreign invaders imperiling Americans' health and jobs. And because Trump can't win on his own negligible merits, it's utterly predictable that his fall campaign will be a relentless smear campaign against Joe Biden as the Manchurian Candidate of 2020.

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The claim that Biden has nefarious financial ties to China is ludicrous, but no more so than demanding that Hillary Clinton be "locked up" for deleting emails. But what's certain is that the Trump campaign will contribute mightily this fall to what the Rand Corporation calls "truth decay" — the erosion of facts and analysis in U.S. public life.

It's not just Trump's compulsive lying. Truth decay also stems from his kill-the-messenger attacks on the media; from online conspiracy mongers and talk radio tub-thumpers who regard our government as an diabolical "deep state" plotting to strip the people of their liberties; and, from Russian and China, which use troll farms to flood social media with disinformation and crackpot theories.

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This assault on the very idea of objective reality may be more dangerous to our democracy than any pandemic. It replaces Jefferson's marketplace of ideas, where reasoned arguments backed by empirical and scientific evidence are essential, with an epistemological free-fire zone in which demagogues like Trump can cook up "alternative facts" aimed not at informing people but reinforcing their tribal biases.

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Only this time, it's not working because hundreds of millions of Americans have witnessed Trump's feckless leadership and directly experienced its consequences.

More than 1.2 million Americans have been infected and 75,500 have lost their lives to COVID-19. That's more than twice the number of deaths recorded by the United Kingdom, which is in second place in fatalities. No one expected the United States to escape the pandemic unscathed. But neither was it inevitable that the coronavirus would hit America harder than any other country.

That is on President Trump. Our government lost two crucial months while Trump denied and dithered, dismissed coronavirus as just another flu; prescribed quack remedies and predicted its imminent disappearance; failed to galvanize national action to produce the equipment and tests needed to combat the pandemic; passed the buck to governors, then feuded endlessly with them; and, bemoaned the shutdown of the "beautiful economy" he had hoped to ride to reelection in November.

So let the president brag. COVID-19 and a wrecked economy are truths he can't spin, and they'll be fresh in voters' minds come November.

Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute

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