President Trump Lives in Two Opposite Coronavirus Realities, and Reality #2 Dominated His Tulsa Rally: The Sad Case of Coronavirus Testing

Donald Trump, White House Portrait

Last night, at his poorly-attended Tulsa, Oklahoma rally, President Trump shouted that he had asked his staff to cut down on coronavirus testing. In fact, Trump boasted for about minute and a half that he had restricted coronavirus testing to keep the numbers down. All through the pandemic crisis, Trump has talked about two inconsistent realities: that the virus is a hoax, and that the virus is real but he is smashing it. Both are untrue. But Trump's comments were not, as Trump's critics think, an admission that Trump has bungled his job. On the contrary, Trump created an unreal reality. And Trump's core voters happily live in his make-believe world.


What Did Trump Say?

Here’s the entire passage in which Trump talked about coronavirus testing:

“And with testing, you know, testing is a double edged sword. We’ve tested now 25 million people. It’s probably 20 million people more than anybody else. Germany’s done a lot. South Korea has done a lot.


“They called me, they said, the job you’re doing … Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please. They test and they test. We had tests and people don’t know what’s going on. We got tests, we got another one over here. The young man’s 10-years-old. He’s got the sniffles. He’ll recover in about 15 minutes. That’s a case, add him to it. That’s okay. That’s a case. I was actually with a very nice man, very good man, even though he’s very liberal, the Governor of New Jersey, right? We know him? Now listen, he said to me, something that’s amazing. New Jersey was very heavily hit, very hard hit, thousands of people. He said with thousands of people that died, thousands of people, there was only one person that died under the age of 18. Would you believe that? Which tells me one thing, that kids are much stronger than us.”

"Slow the testing down, please." In other words, he obstructed necessary public health measures for political benefit. Of course, the White House and the conservative media then claimed that he was just joking. That stunt is getting old.

Yet the United States is not doing enough testing to control the coronavirus, as Dylan Scott pointed out a few days ago, "The number of tests in the US that are coming back positive also suggests we are still not adequately surveilling Covid-19 compared to European countries." Also, as Kaiser Health points out, "The problem is that the U.S. outbreak is worse than that of many other countries — so we need to be testing a higher percentage of our population than do others." Scaling back testing is objectively dangerous. That is the objective reality.

More: Trump Once "Joked" about Being the "Chosen One"


What Are Trump's Two Realities?

Trump has created two coronavirus realities. They contradict one another.  In Reality #1, as witnessed by his now-defunct daily Coronavirus Task Force briefings, Trump claims to have executed massive public health measures to control the pandemic. In that first reality, Trump brings forth the federal government’s apparatus to smash the virus out of existence.

More: Trump Advocated Medical Quackery at a Coronavirus Task Force Briefing

In Trump's make-believe Reality #2, however, the virus is a liberal hoax. In February 2020, Trump complained that the Democrats were creating “their new hoax.” Contrary to Democratic protests, he did not exactly say that the virus was a hoax. He came close enough, however, for, many of his supporters to get the message. It’s nothing to worry about, he implied. In Reality #2, you might think that only wimps wear masks, social distancing is for losers, and public health measures like testing and contact tracing only encourage some kind of far-left liberal agenda. At the Tulsa rally, which attracted some of Trump's most ardent supporters, the first reality – the massive public health reality – disappeared faster than a morning fog. His crowd came to hear about Reality #2, and he delivered.

At the Tulsa rally, social distancing was nil, and masks were hardly to be seen. It seems that the audience lived in Reality #2. Why, they must have been thinking, do we need onerous public health measures to control something that (they believe) is not real?

A rational person would think that the time-honored methods of testing and contact tracing would help to control the pandemic’s progress. A rational person would also note that nations such as, for example, Greece and Portugal, that implemented these policies have been far healthier than the United States. But that kind of thinking would require an audience to live in a reality that’s, well, real.

Politics, however, is not about rationality. So, Trump announced – bragged – in Tulsa that he handled the coronavirus epidemic by not testing for it: “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases.” Not testing, he believed, would keep his numbers down. That's not the real reality, of course. His point was to get the number of identified cases down. Reality #2 strikes again.

Was It a Joke?

Was Trump joking about the coronavirus testing, as the White House and the conservative media later claimed?  Don’t be silly. Video shows that he shouted angrily through the entire passage, and neither he nor his audience so much as cracked a smile.

When he pretended that he had been joking, Trump was shifting back to Reality #1, that he was really working for public health. Obviously, a massive public health effort would require testing. Does anyone believe that he was joking? No. What matters is that his supporters can now pretend, simultaneously, that they believe equally in Reality #1, that Trump is aggressively attacking the coronavirus, and Reality #2, that the virus is a hoax. Just yesterday, some of my South Texas neighbors were telling me on Next Door Neighbors that the coronavirus is a hoax, or that it is only the flu, and that I should stop worrying about getting sick. Last night in Tulsa, Trump ran with Reality #2. My friends were probably happy with that.

Are There Two Realities?

The reader may be asking, can two contradictory realities exist? Well, no, they can't. People who die from the coronavirus can’t choose to believe in Reality #2 and come back to life. At the same time, many Trump supporters are, like some of my neighbors, happy to play along with Reality #2 until and unless, of course, they meet the undertaker themselves. Pending an encounter with the Grim Reaper, however, America should not underestimate the persuasive power of alternative realities. Worse, by boasting about cutting tests, Trump seemed to admit that Reality #1 is phony: he is not making a vigorous public health response. But, if he was only joking, he can convey both contradictory messages at the same time: his gullible Tulsa crowd can believe that the pandemic is a hoax, while he can still play-act to educated Republicans about Reality #1.

Sadly, I regret to say, viruses don’t care whether we live in Trump's imaginary rhetorical reality or not.

P.S.: Technical note for my fellow rhetorical scholars. A major school of thought in our field holds that rhetoric creates reality. This opinion has never appealed to me and, now that I’ve retired, I happily say so out loud. I discussed certain aspects of this issue in one of my first academic articles, which was published in Philosophy and Rhetoric. The article is available in databases and large libraries, but the publisher generously allowed the University of South Carolina to post a preprint so you can read an almost-final version at no charge. You can also click on William Harpine's Publications above.

Thanks to the good people at Rev.Com for quickly posting a verbatim transcript of Trump’s speech.