Читать книгу Disloyal Opposition - Julie Kelly - Страница 8

PREFACE

As this book went to print in spring 2020, the country was in chaos due to the threat of coronavirus, or, as President Trump called it, the “Chinese flu.” After deadly outbreaks consumed parts of China and Italy, US government leaders started to enact harsh measures to combat the virus’s spread here. Schools were closed; college campuses cleared out for the semester; public places shuttered; restaurants, bars, shopping malls, and public beaches closed during the height of spring break. The stock market started to crash, erasing all the gains under the Trump era. People were panicked about not just contracting the disease but the short-term and long-term ramifications of locking down the country during an economic boom.

Forecasts for economic growth in the second quarter were unfathomable: Some experts predicted double-digit drops in gross domestic product for the second and third quarters of 2020, just in time for the November presidential election. This, of course, titillated NeverTrump. As I detail in this book, Trump’s foes on the putative Right seized on every crisis, every rumor, every scandal, to warn that the end days for Donald Trump finally were upon us. “The Trump presidency is over,” declared one NeverTrump writer in the Atlantic on March 13, 2020. “It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.”¹

The nonprofit run by Bill Kristol, NeverTrump’s leader from the start, grotesquely exploited the crisis in television ads that mocked the president’s words as coronavirus cases began to rise.² (The group, as I detail in chapter 8, is largely funded by a left-wing billionaire and sworn enemy of Donald Trump.)

The Bulwark, the refuge of former Weekly Standard editors and contributors after the publication shut down in December 2018, was flooded with columns that accused Trump of lying about the disease and ignoring its early stages (he didn’t). “The country deserves competent and responsible leadership and so, for the country’s sake, Trump should lose in November,” Kristol wrote in the Bulwark on March 19, 2020. “He probably will lose. But this is by no means inevitable. So we can’t be complacent.”³ The media were apoplectic over Trump’s insistence on calling COVID-19 the “Chinese flu.” NeverTrump, per usual, played along. “It’s vitally important to push back against Chinese propaganda regarding the virus. That can be done directly, by refuting Chinese lies. Dunking on each other, by contrast, seems like a frivolous sideshow,” tweeted David French on March 20.⁴ NeverTrumpers who had spent nearly four years dunking on Trump, his administration, Republican lawmakers, and Trump supporters suddenly were very worried about hurting the feelings of communist China. David Frum, a senior editor at the Atlantic, instead suggested calling the disease the “Trump plague.”

Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor, fantasized that the disease would kill more Republicans than Democrats. Fox News, she falsely claimed, had downplayed the crisis. “There is a particular cruelty/irony that it is their core viewers, the Republican older viewers, who are the most at risk,” she said on MSNBC on March 15.⁵ She also commended Democrats for canceling campaign events before Trump did. “So, I hate to put it this way, but there will be less Democrat deaths because there will be less mass gatherings. There will be less opportunities for people to congregate and share this horrible disease.” Eager to blame any fatalities on Trump, Rick Wilson, a self-proclaimed Republican strategist, started referring to the president as “President Kevorkian.”⁶

As of this writing, it’s hard to know how the economic and political fallout of the coronavirus crisis will affect Trump’s reelection chances. (After instituting a 15-day social distancing policy to try to stem a rise in confirmed cases, President Trump on March 29 announced an extension of that policy until April 30, 2020.) But one thing is certain: NeverTrump will weaponize every aspect of the chaos, including the number of dead, against Trump. Of all the low points of NeverTrump’s crusade against the president, it will be the lowest.