During his last
presidential debate against Joe Biden, President Donald Trump said that the
coronavirus epidemic is “not my fault.” He did not, however, mean what his critics think he meant. Trump didn't just reject policy; he rejected analytical argument. 
Coronavirus, CDC Image
As I write this post, there have been, according to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 42,343,866 cases of the 2019 coronavirus, of which 8,508,467 have been in the United States of America. That’s more than 20% of the worldwide total. Of 1,146,221 global deaths from the disease, 224,188 have been in the United States, far more than any other nation. That’s more than 19% of the worldwide total. Yet, the United States has only 4.23% of the world’s population. Coronavirus has hit us harder than any other nation.
In the debate, Trump denied that the pandemic was his fault:
“I take full responsibility. It's not my fault that it came here. It's China's fault. You know what, it's not Joe's fault that it came here either. It's China's fault. They kept it from going into the rest of China, for the most part, but they didn't keep it from coming out to the world including Europe and ourselves.”
“It’s not my fault” has become Trump’s mantra. Someone who takes “full responsibility” does not say “it’s not my fault” in the next sentence. This statement, which Trump made in the first 12 minutes of the debate, was his crucial argument. As always with Trump, however, there’s more than meets the eye.
Responding, Biden distinguished – as he should have – between the virus arriving in the United States and what actions the government took after it arrived:
“The fact is, when we knew it was coming, when it hit — What happened? What did the President say? He said don't worry, it's going to go away, it’s going to be gone by Easter. Don't worry, the warm weather. Don't worry, maybe inject bleach — he said he was kidding when he said that, but a lot of people thought it was serious. A whole range of things the President said. And even today, he thinks we are in control. We're about to lose 200,000 more people.”
Biden's more analytical response appealed to his own voting base, but Trump's supporters are unlikely to see his point.
To understand what Trump said, to comprehend why so many of his supporters think he’s done a great job with the coronavirus, we need to see that Trump's supporters do not, by and large, think the same way as Trump’s opponents. They live in a different mental and social universe. Critical thinking is not part of their bargain. When Trump said “It's not my fault that it came here. It's China's fault,” his base voters did not hear weakness. Instead, they quickly understood that he was defending them from a Chinese conspiracy.
Two different arguments!
So, we have two distinct lines of argument: conspiracy argument and analytical argument. Conspiracy argument focuses on how the virus started. Analytical argument discusses what we can do to stop the virus. Trump’s main line of attack – just like his mainline argument in his recent 60 Minutes interview – was to say that it wasn’t his fault. President Trump is obviously not responsible for what happened in China. He is, however, responsible for his actions after the pandemic spread to the United States. We have passed the point where Trump can say that the virus will go away without hurting anyone. He sidestepped whether his subsequent policies, like inadequate testing, failing to provide medical equipment, or not encouraging masks, were his fault.
Earlier Post: Trump Denied that the Virus Was His Fault in His 60 Minutes Interview
Why would that persuade his supporters? To understand
this, we need to understand two different kinds of audiences. One kind of
audience analyzes facts and figures and studies cause and effect. If we have a
problem, let’s figure out what caused it, and find a way to remove the cause.
That, by the way, is how high school and college debaters are trained to
think. In high school and college debate, the idea is to find a problem, identify
a cause, remove the cause, and prove that the solution doesn’t cause more
problems than it solves. In an article that I published about what debaters
call the stock issues, I explain how this kind of analytical thinking arises from theories
of ethics and morals. Public policy should bring widespread benefit to the
public without causing unnecessary harm.
Analytical argument
Here's an example of the analytical approach. An August 2020 article in Counter Punch listed five failures of Trump’s policy that spread the pandemic across the land: for example, he delayed taking decisive action, failed to encourage mask-wearing, and delayed the production of necessary medical equipment. Trump’s policy failures, they say, aggravated the crisis.
Similarly, an article on the liberal website Vox faulted Trump for downplaying the crisis and dismantling the nation's pandemic plan. That is, they argue that he could have done more to deal with the pandemic. That, also, is an analytical approach. Biden's own response, quote above, was analytical.
Conspiracy argument
Many people, however, do not think that way. Many people think instead that the world is controlled by vast, impersonal forces that wish them harm. Many conservatives today fear something called “the New World Order.” They think that mysterious, malicious forces control public policy. It is only natural for them to assume that the far-away Chinese government would conspire against them. Pew Research found that “about a third (34%) of Republicans and independents who lean to the GOP say the theory that powerful people intentionally planned the COVID-19 outbreak is probably or definitely true, compared with 18% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.”For example,
about 50% of Trump’s supporters see merit in the bizarre QAnon conspiracy
theory. Or consider
megachurch pastor and enthusiastic Trump supporter Rodney Howard-Browne, who
told his congregation last March to ignore coronavirus restrictions because the
coronavirus was really just a scare tactic of people who seek world domination:
“Because the climate change narrative for global governance failed, they are
using the World Health Organization to then come in and take over the control
of nations and then they are going to bring in vaccines.” Howard-Browne is not
an outlier: if readers wonder why white evangelical Christians support Trump so
enthusiastically, Howard-Browne’s reasoning could explain that. Trump is, they think, protecting them from conspiracies. The coronavirus is, to them, just one part of that imaginary global menace.
Conclusion
So, whose fault is it that our nation is ravaged by a virus? Many people, including most university professors and mainstream media writers, will take an analytical approach. By an analytical approach, yes, it’s pretty much Trump’s fault. For example, a recent study published in Nature Medicine found that universal mask-wearing could prevent more than 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the next few months. Yet Trump still fails to encourage masks.
But if we think
that the virus is only one part of a massive conspiracy created by China and other
mysterious international forces, then, no, it’s not Trump’s fault. By that line
of thinking, the United States does not need masks, social distancing, or
quarantines. Instead, we need someone who will fight the global
conspiracy.
If we think (as I do) that the pandemic’s cause is a virus spread by nature, we want to take public health measures. If we think that an enemy did it to us – China, for example – we want someone to protect us from our enemy. That protection is what Trump offers his supporters. And, to all appearances, they feel a need for nothing else.
In the meantime, reality always wins. Always. Our nation is needlessly ravaged by disease. Please, dear reader, wear a mask when you go out in public. It’s not that hard.
Technical note: If you'd like to see my publications about stock issues in debate, click the link to “William D. Harpine's Publications” above.
