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Richard Stengel: Why Trump's Coronavirus Optimism Isn't Working
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/why-trump-coronavirus-optimism-isnt-workingCoronavirus
Why Trump’s Coronavirus Optimism Isn’t Working
When FDR projected optimism in the depths of the Great Depression, it was based on candor and competence. Trump is trying to mimic it, but his own lies undermine him.
By Richard Stengel
April 20, 2020
On a blustery March morning, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood behind a podium on the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to give his inaugural address, America was in the depths of the Great Depression. Most banks were shuttered, millions had lost their life savings, and about a quarter of Americans were unemployed. It was a dark moment. FDR sought to project optimism, but it was optimism seasoned with candor. Though the best known line in that speech occurs in the fifth sentence of the opening paragraph, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the second sentence declares, “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth.” In that brief opening paragraph of 153 words, he mentions not only “truth,” but “candor,” and “frankness.”
The projection of optimism is a hallmark of great leaders, and FDR might have been our greatest model of that presidential virtue. But from the first he was clear that in times of crisis, optimism also required realism—realism in the form of honesty about the nature of the challenge itself. He understood that to engage a whole nation, he could not sugarcoat the task ahead. Optimism had to be earned. In President Donald Trump’s efforts to project optimism, he has been anything but candid and honest. To simply say, “We see light at the end of the tunnel,” without facts or data to back it up, is not optimism but dissembling. Optimism unaccompanied by realism is hollow. Trump’s optimism is more like that of the classic American species, “the confidence man,” the swindler who sells you a bill of goods and then moves on to the next sucker. Moreover, his optimism always seems self-serving, as though it is more about people rewarding him for being upbeat than how he is grappling with the crisis itself. As FDR said in the third paragraph of his inaugural address, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”
FDR’s projection of optimism was also rooted in morality and ethics. This is true of almost all American presidents. In his inaugural he criticizes greed (“the falsity of material wealth”), saying that American restoration depends on the extent to which “we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” This is contrasted with Trump’s complete lack of a moral or ethical call to duty, and his repeated declaration that we must “reopen the economy,” without citing any moral value to that other than an increase in the GDP or the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It is more about his obvious disappointment that “the greatest economy in the history of our country” (a ridiculously false claim, by the way) is under siege by a virus.
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FDR also projected optimism by being unruffled in the face of crisis. With his cigarette holder pointed upward like the trajectory of a rising graph, his V-for-victory salute, his jaunty smile, he projected a never-let-them-see-you-sweat confidence. FDR wore pounds of steel braces to give a speech or get in or out of a car, but would never ever project self-pity. Eleanor Roosevelt said of her husband that even after he had been struck with polio, “I never heard him complain.” Trump, on the other hand, seems to make himself the primary victim of the pandemic, as though it was aimed directly at him. No matter the crisis, he is always the first casualty. Instead of talking about the real victims—those who are ill and those who have died—he spends much of his daily press conferences blaming and accusing others for failures that are attributable to him. FDR had his own grievances with the press, and once complained that he thought 85% of the press was against him. But he would never let the public see him wounded by the press or publicly label them “the enemy of the people.”
Part of the reason presidents attempt to project optimism is so Americans will feel confident in their government. Roosevelt was also intent on changing the perception of government from a distant and indifferent bystander to a direct means of support for people in trouble. Roosevelt said the public welfare was the great duty of the state, and he attempted to give people confidence in the federal government. That has been difficult for Trump to do. From his boasting that avoiding taxes was the “smart” thing to do to his offhand remark last month that the federal government was “not a shipping clerk,” his disdain for the idea that government has a role in the public welfare has been painfully obvious. Trump is a manifestation of three decades of Republicans running against government. His understanding of federalism is minimal, and he tasks the states with jobs that should be carried out by the administration. Now, when he wants people to trust government to do the right thing, he has a hard time making that argument. You can project cheap optimism and unsupported confidence as much as you want, but reality is a stubborn thing. Ultimately—and particularly in a crisis—confidence in a leader comes from one thing: competence.
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you would find it hard to believe he knows what he's saying let alone believe in it.
