For all the daily insanity of the Trump presidency, almost nothing has actually happened to the country since January 20, 2017. No Oklahoma City, no 9/11, no financial crisis, no black guy getting elected president, no culture-rattling social justice movements springing up as the result of police killing black people on videotape. The crises the country has faced since Trump’s inauguration have been largely of the natural variety—hurricanes Harvey and Maria, the California Camp Fire—or the naturally American sort—Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Tree of Life—disasters that just happen, like continental drift or asteroid strikes from deep space, acts best understood as the unalterable volition of an inscrutable god and from which no rational action can be taken in terms of prevention, defense, or response. Trump will not be judged by his response to those events any more than he’ll be judged by his administration’s response to unusual cloud formations. Besides, in all cases, of course, he absolutely fucking nailed it.

Which is to say that the ceaseless tumult and tempestuousness of the Trumppening has been brewed most entirely in the man’s own twittering teapot. Fights about the inaugural crowd size, baseless assertions that three or five million fraudulent voters cost him the popular vote, the purposeful chaos of the definitely-not-a-Muslim-ban travel ban—the president went to war with the institutions that had just installed him as the most powerful person on the planet, with the press, with voters, with phantom foreign devils, with reality. And that was just the first week of the administration, when he had the political benefit of a net-positive approval rating in a mind-boggling forty-four states.

Until just a couple of weeks ago, the biggest national crisis the country has faced over the last few years has been the ongoing emergency of the Trump presidency itself. Given the gross incompetence, gleeful corruption, and aggressive cruelty of the administration so plainly on display for anyone who cares to see it, we have actually been very lucky since the beginning of 2017, in this regard. (If you think this is in any way meant to downplay the severity of the emergency, or the very real damage Trump and his administration have wrought on this world and its citizens, I invite you to look at just about anything I have written in the last [shoots self] five years.) Until coronavirus, before this threat, it almost didn’t matter that the president was a self-concerned thin-skinned moron at the head of an authoritarian cult of personality. Trump has finally, inevitably, been confronted with a situation that requires actual presidenting. To say that “the wheels have finally come off” would be to suggest that this administration ever was a functioning car in the first place, rather than a perpetual grift machine powered by Trump’s own sucking greed for attention. The pandemic—like any real external threat the administration might have faced instead—has revealed the hollowness inside the circus, sliced open to expose not some secret mechanistic clockwork of the orange(-man), but nothing at all. There was never anyone or anything back there. The stupidity and the absurdity of the Trumppening was never some cover, did not mask an administration doing the hard work of governance behind the scenes—the “adults in the room,” especially after the first year or so, only ever really concerned with keeping the boss happy. The hollow show is all there ever was, a news cycle generator and reaction machine that never quits and can’t be reprogrammed for any other use. And he is, as ever, always telling you exactly who he is.

Which is to say, we are quite fucked.

The first couple of public statements that Trump made about the virus were terrible and absurd and not in keeping with known reality, of course, because of course they were. I even think that’s mostly fine—Trump being wrong on a new topic is as forgivable as it is predictable, given his consistent wrongness on most all topics—especially any time he’s making normative, rather than descriptive, statements. But it’s still worth noting, the first few things he said. On January 22, speaking to CNBC in Davos, Trump said that he wasn’t at all worried about a pandemic.

His first tweet about the virus followed two days later, wherein he praised China for their efforts at containment and assured everyone that “it will all work out well.”

Four days after that, he retweeted a link from One America News with the headline “Johnson & Johnson to create coronavirus vaccine”—a story that seems to no longer exist on their website.

The first real action Trump took to respond to the virus was on January 31, when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced the president’s decision to limit travel from China into the United States. This was, at best, a modest half-measure, as it still allowed plenty of human beings into the country from China. From factcheck(dot)org’s rundown of the issue:

At a House subcommittee hearing on the coronavirus on Feb. 5, Ron Klain, White House Ebola response coordinator under the Obama administration, took issue with the characterization of the travel restrictions as a travel “ban.”

“We don’t have a travel ban,” Klain said. “We have a travel Band-Aid right now. First, before it was imposed, 300,000 people came here from China in the previous month. So, the horse is out of the barn.”

“There’s no restriction on Americans going back and forth,” Klain said. “There are warnings. People should abide by those warnings. But today, 30 planes will land in Los Angeles that either originated in Beijing or came here on one-stops, 30 in San Francisco, 25 in New York City. Okay? So, unless we think that the color of the passport someone carries is a meaningful public health restriction, we have not placed a meaningful public health restriction.”

So while Trump has touted this “Chinese travel ban” as a brave and decisive action that saved countless lives, the reality is that Trump issued an order that had a minimal impact on the spread of the virus while giving him something to point at as brave and decisive.

I could go on at some length documenting all the ways Trump spent the first six weeks of this crisis either lying about the nation’s preparedness or downplaying the severity of the problem, and there are plenty of articles out there that do just that. But I want to jump ahead to when he finally started taking things seriously, in order to get back to the point above, about his incompetence and our fucked-ed-ness.

On Wednesday, March 11, Trump addressed the nation in prime time from behind his desk in the Oval Office. In about ten minutes of a prepared, teleprompter’d speech, the president laid bare how completely unequipped he is for any serious moment.

“We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next thirty days,” he said, reading from remarks prepared by the very people tasked with planning and implementing the administration’s response, and somehow still being wrong about it.

“These prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing,”
Trump said, reading from remarks prepared by the very people tasked with planning and implementing the administration’s response, and somehow still being wrong about it.

“Earlier this week, I met with the leaders of health insurance industry who have agreed to waive all copayments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments, and to prevent surprise medical billing,” Trump said, reading from remarks prepared by the very people tasked with planning and implementing the administration’s response, and somehow still being wrong about it. (The insurance companies had agreed to cover the cost of testing—assuming you could find a doctor to test you!—not the cost of treatment.)

Trump and his staff could not even write and deliver a ten minute speech on national television that accurately summarized their own (terrible, incomplete) plans for dealing with this crisis. This is the lowest of low bars to clear—describing what you yourself are about to do—and Trump crawled right up to the bar, knelt down, opened his mouth, and violently curbed himself on it. It is not a symptom of “Trump derangement syndrome”—nor even remotely partisan—to think that this is a sign of a failing or failed administration. It’s just plainly true.

Two days later, on March 13, in a press conference in which he officially declared a national emergency to help combat the spread of the virus, Trump claimed that some 1,700 Google engineers were hard at work on a website that would launch very, very soon. The promised website would help any American determine whether or not they should go get a test for the novel coronavirus, direct them to the appropriate drive-thru testing location, and eventually reveal the results of their test.

This was, of course, nearly entirely made up.

But on Friday, President Trump inflated the concept far beyond reality. At a news conference in the Rose Garden, he said that the company was helping to develop a website that would sharply expand testing for the virus, falsely claiming that “Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now” and adding that “they’ve made tremendous progress.”

In truth, the project at Verily — which has a total of about 1,000 employees — is in its infancy. A pilot program is planned for the San Francisco area, but a website has yet to be unveiled. Testing locations have not been identified, and the coronavirus tests themselves are not yet widely available.

But the best part was a snide aside, a remark Trump spoke into his shirt in an attempt to dunk on Barack Obama for a perceived failure from a decade ago.

“Google is helping to develop a website. It’s gonna be very quickly done—unlike websites of the past—to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location.”

“Unlike websites of the past” is pure Trump poetry. It would go on his gravestone if he weren’t immortal.

Again, I could continue to list examples of things Trump has said and done in the intervening week and a half that illustrate just how bad his response to this crisis has been. I believe it to be a plain fact, based on all of the available evidence, even as Trump attempts to deny the reality of what he has said since January. On March 17, he began claiming “This is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

So, yes, Trump’s response to this first real crisis of his presidency has been catastrophic. The cult, of course, believes precisely the opposite.

According to recent (actual) polls, “More Americans say President Trump has done a good job (50%) rather than bad job (45%) dealing with the coronavirus outbreak. (…) Opinion of how Trump has dealt with the crisis is decidedly partisan, with the number saying he has done a good job ranging from 89% of Republicans to 48% of independents and 19% of Democrats.”

Which is to say that what I said above—about the first real (non-Trump-inclusive) crisis of the Trump presidency exposing the hollowshow nature of the whole rotten grift—is flatly wrong. A wish. A naive expectation. A bogus claim from authority. True enough to me, long convinced, but meaningless to anyone else. Just another tossed off self-impressed verse in this long, stupid, pointless song, another Unlike Websites of the Past. Instead, it remains the case that Trump is good, actually, and brilliant and determined and worthy of the adulatory tears of very strong men.

In an absolutely brilliant blog that I never quite got around to writing six months ago, I (would have) convincingly argued that the Hurricane Dorian Sharpie Map Fiasco of September 2019 was the single most Trump event of the Trump presidency. SharpieGate is the Rosetta Stone of understanding the Trumppening, illustrating how he “wins” every fight with the media not on the merits, not on the facts, but by being extremely wrong and fully committed. The only way he’ll ever lose his grip on the cult is if he acquiesces to the media. As long as he can play the aggrieved victim of media scorn, he wins. He wins by having the fight.

BRIEF ASIDE — Holyfuckingshit, I cannot believe SharpieGate was a mere six months ago. Something has come loose, or become too tight, or something, because time is extremely out of joint.

This is what the permanent culture war looks like. It has nothing to do with reality at all. This is a cult of convenience and circumstance, a cult that has nothing to do with belief, or a certainty that the cult leader actually has any answers. A cult of negative partisanship, yes, but much deeper—a cult that doesn’t actually like anything about its leader besides the feelings he is able to generate in their perceived enemies. A cult that believes only that it couldn’t have been any better any other way.

In a blog I actually did write, back in August of 2017, I put it this way:

The morality of any given entity or situation isn’t secondary to [Trump]—it’s utterly non-existent, a non-factor. I think this comes out of a peculiar sort of reductive nihilism—a specific sort that I first noticed in very redneck-y poor white people, but I recognize more and more elsewhere, now. They believe they have discovered the absolute base, terrible nature of our true humanity, and have no illusions about it. Everyone is just another shit-stain human being. None of us are any better, all of us are utter shit with nothing to redeem us. To pretend otherwise is just the false, politically-correct nonsense of “putting on airs.”

“You ain’t no better than me, because none of us is any better than our absolute worst selves,” they believe. All of us just crabs in a big ol’ bucket.

This is why 60% of his supporters can’t “think of anything that Trump could do, or fail to do, in his term as president that would make [them] disapprove of the job he is doing,” according to a recent nationwide poll. On the whole spectrum of human behavior, they can conceive of nothing that he could do that would cost him their support. Not because they can’t imagine what he’s capable of sinking to, but because it doesn’t fucking matter, because we’re all the same, anyway. “Because he ain’t no worse than me, he sure ain’t no worse than you, and he’s my guy.”

And everything is fought in terms of the culture war. Wannabe cos-playing Nazis marching in the streets don’t get roundly, soundly, uncontroversially condemned because the facts don’t matter, only the culture war matters. Hurricanes aren’t just natural disasters about which nothing can be done, really—they’re also an opportunity to fight about who we are. The flag is to be hugged and humped and kissed while your troll-y campaign song blares from the speakers, not respected as representative of the common ideals of all Americans—as though such a thing exists! The pandemic isn’t an existential crisis for potentially millions of people, not a time to put partisan concerns aside and save actual fucking human lives. It’s a war against an invisible enemy, and anyone who speaks ill of the war effort is a traitor to the cause. And it’s a war we will win, unlike websites of the past.

This is how the “is calling it the ‘China Virus’ or the ‘Wuhan Virus’ racist” media and twitter discourse becomes an easy, obvious win for Trump. Trump calls it the “China Virus” as a means of blame-shifting, of rejecting responsibility, and because he knows that it is absolutely irresistible bait for the media. The conversation is immediately about whether or not it’s racist, utterly obscuring the fact that he’s blaming China rather than acknowledging his own failings. It shows up in Trump-friendly-media as amused outrage at the politically-correct-obsessed lunatic left, wherein they get to claim that the media, instead of focusing on the REAL PROBLEMS this virus presents to the country, are worried about hurting imaginary Asian people’s feelings.

We are quite fucked, is what I’m saying. We’re fucked because Trump and his administration (very predictably) catastrophically downplayed the severity of the first real crisis they faced, and have completely bungled the federal government’s response. Hundreds of thousands of people will be sick. Many, many people will die. But the fucked-ed-ness is so complete, and so completely predates the current moment, that even a total and obvious failure of the basics of governing will not register with enough people to matter. The failure will be attributed to someone else, or to the unalterable volition of an inscrutable god. It couldn’t have been any other way. And certainly no one else could have done a better job. Because unlike websites of the past, obviously. And next time, of course, he’ll do better. Unlike websites of the past.

And when the fever breaks, when Trump is finally gone, when we are rid of his unique sickness, there will be no reckoning. No apologies. No sheepishness or shame. The cultists will say that they knew all along how bad he was. That he wasn’t the point, not really. The point was just the empty, reductive non-belief in anything. The point was how he made you feel. The point was unlike websites of the past.