Many Americans, perhaps most, appear to view the president as a public intellectual or shock-jock media personality. Voters increasingly pledge their loyalty to a candidate who not only articulates what they want to hear, but does so in the way they want to hear it. One problem with this reduction of the presidency — one among many — is that it eliminates nearly everything that the federal government does from political consideration.
Donald Trump gains support from his congregants, rather than loses it, when he excels in the only role that he is capable of performing — a weird combination of dive-bar drunkard, unable to filter the stream of pollutants that move through his mind and out his mouth, and Fox News talking head. A former reality television star and a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, Trump represents the culmination of “infotainment,” the process that has dragged politics from the Lincoln-Douglas debates down to relentless name-calling, bloviation and lies.
It turns out that the work of politics is actually boring. Talented writers like Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet can make a fictionalized version of drafting legislation or managing public agencies seem exhilarating or amusing, but ensuring that the Department of the Interior competently oversees the management of public land is not likely to translate into a hit show on any cable network or streaming platform.
There is nothing like a potential pandemic to remind an easily distracted electorate that governance matters. As the coronavirus spreads, the death count rises and people all over the world begin to fear infection, the incoherent and dangerous reaction of the Trump administration offers a high-stakes indictment. This is what happens when you elect someone to run the federal government who has no prerequisite knowledge, experience or ability for public policy and administration.
The Obama administration opened 49 overseas offices of the Centers for Disease Control, designed to proactively prevent viruses from reaching pandemic proportions. Over the objections of medical experts within his own administration, our current president has shut down 39 of them. One of these satellite CDC offices was in China.
For the past two years, Trump’s budget proposal has included reductions to the CDC and the National Institute of Health. If we want proof that elections have implications on the actual work of government — on not merely who is able to give inspiring or outrageous speeches with a title in front of his or her name — the House Democratic majority prevented those cuts from going into effect.
Congress could not, however, prevent Trump from neglecting the fundamental responsibilities of his position. In 2018, the director of the National Security Council’s global pandemic prevention effort resigned, and his entire staff subsequently did likewise. Trump has not replaced them, creating massive vulnerabilities in the U.S. response to the coronavirus outbreak.