Let it not be said that President Trump can’t learn anything from President Obama. Actually, it was Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who famously upset people who suffered from adversity by saying, in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Before we get into how President Trump can apply this strategy, it might be noted that the ever calculating Mr. Emanuel was not the first person to come up with the Idea. It was no less a statesman than Winston Churchill who was credited with having said, during World War II, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” although researchers who have investigated this quotation have found no better substantiation than that “it sounds like something Churchill would say,” in the context of a meeting he had with Stalin and Roosevelt, at which the idea of establishing a United Nations was brought up.
Actually, digging a bit deeper into history, one finds evidence that a figure even more calculating than Rahm Emanuel – no less than Niccolo Machiavelli – was on record as having written “Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis.”
They all understood that crises provide opportunities not to be bound by policies of the past but to achieve transformational change, one way or another.
The coronavirus crisis has given employees unprecedented opportunities to work from home, for example (even creating a new abbreviation of WFH), and to save the time, expense, inconvenience, and aggravation of commuting, which many of them sought even before the advent of the Internet, let alone of the coronavirus.
Until President’s Trump testing positive (the only time the media used the word “positive” in a sentence about the president), it may have seemed that the Trump campaign for re-election had never faced a crisis as debilitating as the one caused by this terrible plague, considering that the world never locked down its own people and industries the way it has locked down its entire economies, while, incidentally, unlocking many prison doors, ironically, in all too many instances, so that prisoners wouldn’t be cooped up in contagious prisons. This combination of suffering imposed on innocent citizens of the world is absolutely staggering and frustrating, especially now that we know that locking free people in their homes can be more dangerous to them than allowing them to breathe fresh air (though with masks, social distancing, and hand washing, of course), but we digress.
Perhaps the only greater crisis imaginable at this time to the Trump re-election campaign can be the crisis faced as Democrats and other leftists gleefully watched him suffer for a few days and his campaign seem to implode temporarily at what the Never Trumpers see as the delicious irony of seeing the person who disparaged the coerced use of masks seemingly brought to the brink of the ultimate precipice, G-d forbid, for failing to encourage the use of masks among everyone he was close to – and everyone who felt close to him, literally and figuratively, from near and afar. The Democrats and other leftists see President Trump as “hoist on his own petard” (falling on his own explosive device), or, in this case, breathing the contaminated air he allowed himself to breathe.
The Democrats have one main hope to avoid letting the American people realize the extent to which the Democrats will turn the country into a socialist or pseudo-socialist country and the extent to which the Democrats encourage the looters and rioters to have more of an impact than the peaceful protesters, and the extent to which naïve people believe that defunding the police will help civilization instead of improving the police, which is now ironically often headed and/or dominated by African-Americans, and removing the few rotten apples.
The Democrats’ main hope is to turn the focus onto the current pandemic and President Trump’s failure to hold it in check despite the President’s warning the American people of the impending pandemic in his State of the Union message, which Nancy Pelosi promptly tore up, and despite the President’s ending Chinese entry into the United States early in the pandemic when Democrats were calling this decision xenophobic and calling for – and focusing on — the president’s impeachment, and despite President Trump’s converting industries into makers of more ventilators, masks, and gloves than were needed, and despite President Trump’s initiation of attempts to manufacture a viable vaccine at warp speed, and to mobilize the national guard to distribute it as fast as possible, and despite all the help he provided to all the governors including the governors of New York and California, who acknowledged and appreciated his assistance when it was granted, before stabbing him in the back like virtually all their Democratic colleagues.
But when President Trump got infected himself, the only question seemed to be whether he or his campaign would be more mortally hurt, and which would implode first.
There are some options at the President’s disposal:
- The President can point out that as much as the Chinese betrayed him, science betrayed him even more, because scientists – including Dr. Fauci – originally said that masks could be not only unnecessary for the general population, but even counterproductive.
- President Trump halted Chinese entry to the country at the end of January because of the science. Biden and other Democrats called this xenophobic, and Nancy Pelosi urged people to visit Chinatowns in American cities in response!
- The scientists originally encouraged the country to lock down – and dismantle the economy that President Trump had stimulated so effectively (as to GDP, the stock market, employment even of minorities, etc.) when what the American people really needed was more fresh air, along with the masks, social distancing, hand washing, and so on.
- Above all, there is no question that the scientists were the people who created the tests for everyone who entered the White House bubble and every other bubble President Trump entered, and these tests were what encouraged the president to dispense with the masks.
- President Trump didn’t belittle the wearing of a mask at the first debate. He actually provided a visual aid, pulling one out of his pocket to show he has access to it when needed now (when not in a bubble or socially distanced as he was during the debate). He pointed out that Biden uses the mask for show even when not needed, when socially distanced. Biden, incidentally, did not produce a mask while at the podium. Trump actually was following science. Biden was providing theatre.
- President Trump was also ahead of the curve — and of the Democrats — when mentioning his concern about the coronavirus as early as in his State of the Union message. Nancy Pelosi’s response? She ripped up her copy of his speech. Who showed a concern for science then? She also focused all attention on impeachment instead of on the coronavirus.
- Nevertheless, the president should concede that in this one area, he realizes it is wrong for people to gather together without masks and social distancing, especially outside the bubble and without being tested first; in a normal world, violent demonstrators, looters, and arsonists would be held to at least the same standard as peaceful church, synagogue, and mosque goers.
- The President should say that because of what he has just gone through, he can now empathize with all coronavirus patients – whose lives matter too –more than most Americans who have not tested positive can; science is enhanced when combined with personal experience, and, if all else fails.
- The president can continue to point out that he led by taking risks for the American people, in being among them, and in taking medications on the cutting edge that he now encourages everyone else to have access to.
- He can benefit from the outrage at the lack of sympathy of the people who are openly gleeful when considering his diagnosis and even wish him the worst prognosis possible, and if all else continues to fail, he should benefit from some sympathy himself. When discussing the human toll of the virus, President Trump consistently says that even one death is too many.
Even if President Trump made some mistakes in coping with the coronavirus, he has presumably learned his lesson, and even if he hasn’t, such a pandemic is not expected to happen again for another century, but most importantly even if another pandemic occurs earlier, a vote against Trump may be a vote in favor of socialism, criminals, political correctness, indoctrination of students, open borders (to usurp American jobs and quality health care and other services), prohibitive taxes, and atheism, while limiting the exercise of free will, free speech, the ability of the country to protect itself and its allies from attack by weapons larger than a virus, and the ability of individuals to practice their religion freely, considering that much of what is in the Bible and the Koran would be deemed against public policy, so that traditional houses of worship and parochial schools would be banned, G-d forbid, all if not immediately, eventually, and in perpetuity (especially if the Democrats grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and pack the Supreme Court).
President Trump’s alleged pattern of denial of the gravity of the coronavirus has cost him dearly, even though the virus is no longer nearly as deadly as it was in March, because of advances of scientists’ knowledge. Perhaps the President’s obviously enhanced empathy and humility at this point can finally win over the millions of people who want capitalism and their constitutional freedoms to continue, along with police forces that are colorblind and purged of their rotten apples, but [these potential voters] who just can’t stomach the president’s character as amplified and distorted every day by the media. Yes, black lives matter, and “blue” lives matter, but so do the lives of everyone else, including the President of the United States.
By Ron A. Y.
Ron A. Y. Rich has written widely on political topics . Many of his articles have been taken off the Internet by people who claim to be progressive but who are actually regressive in terms of freedom of expression and the open exchange of ideas.
