Will Surviving a Plague End Trumpism?

No living native Americans have ever lived through an experience like the nation now faces. 9-11 was a national trauma, but its impacts were short term for most of the country save New York City first and foremost, and around the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to a lesser extent.  The questions that some are asking are (i) will this change America's divided state, and (ii) will it end Trumpism and its focus on an "us versus them" mentality.   A piece in Politico looks at these questions as does a column in New York Magazine by Andrew Sullivan.  Here is a taste from the optimistic piece in Politico piece: 

[N]o matter how the coronavirus pandemic passes, or how quickly, there is likely in these strange housebound weeks a new political epoch being born.

Trumpism as a style is defined not just by boasting and bluster; his triumphalism depends on projecting certitude. The president early on acted as if he could indeed create reality by proclamation, when he assured the public that U.S. infections would soon be down to zero.

Only in recent days, as the possibility of widespread domestic disease mounts, has Trump acknowledged imprecision—the fragmentary nature of our understanding of how far the virus has spread, how effective efforts to blunt its impact will be, or when these efforts will be deemed sufficient.

The coronavirus pandemic does not remotely have the cataclysmic shock and violence of 9/11. For many people, however, the virus’ actual day-in, day-out impact will be more pervasive. 9-11 was followed by a period, which turned out to be short-lived, of national connection and goodwill. Trump, who has made mockery and castigation of opponents his signature, surely did not conjure fuzzy feelings from many quarters with his appeal at the White House on Wednesday that, “We are all in this together.”

Yet the pandemic has a logic that transcends politics and personal feeling. Never mind how one feels about Trump. Never mind how we feel about one another. The reality of a dangerous virus is that we are all in this together.

Andrew Sullivan's piece is lengthier and notes among other things that much of America's medical supplies come from China - the nation Trump is seeking to blame for his administrations failure to prepare for a pandemic.  It also looks at how the pandemic could either strengthen Trump - especially among his cult followers - or be his undoing.  It might also force Americans to reassess where American society had descended.  Which direction will prevail is yet to be seen.  Here are column highlights:

And this will change us. It must. All plagues change society and culture, reversing some trends while accelerating others, shifting consciousness far and wide, with consequences we won’t discover for years or decades. The one thing we know about epidemics is that at some point they will end. The one thing we don’t know is who we will be then.

I know that I was a different man at the end of the plague of AIDS than I was at the beginning, just as so many gay men and many others were. You come face-to-face with mortality and the randomness of fate, and you are changed. You have a choice: to submit to fear and go under, or to live with the virus and do what you can. And the living with it, while fighting it, is what changes you over time; it requires more than a little nerve and more than a little steel. Plague living dispenses with the unnecessary, lays bare whom you can trust and whom you can’t, and also reveals what matters. Plagues destroy so much — but through the devastation, they can also rebuild and renew. . . . . Like wars, plagues can make us see where we are, shake us into a new understanding of the world, reshape our priorities, and help us judge what really matters and what actually doesn’t. Testing kits matter. Twitter not so much. Politically, who knows? Much will depend on the skills of the politicians grasping this moment for their various ends. But a lot is at stake, and I suspect that those who think COVID-19 all but kills Donald Trump’s reelection prospects are being, as usual, too optimistic.

National crises, even when handled at this level of incompetence and deceit, can, over time, galvanize public support for a national leader. As Trump instinctually finds a way to identify the virus as “foreign,” he will draw on these lizard-brain impulses, and in a time of fear, offer the balm of certainty to his cult and beyond. It’s the final bonding: blind support for the leader even at the risk of your own sickness and death. Watching Fox News operate in real time in ways Orwell described so brilliantly in Nineteen Eighty-Four — compare “We had always been at war with Eastasia” with “I’ve felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic” —  you’d be a fool not to see the potential for the Republican right to use this plague for whatever end they want. On the other hand, even further incompetence or failure on Trump’s part could finally, maybe, puncture the cult, and deliver the White House to Biden and the Congress to the Democrats. And the huge sums now being proposed by even the GOP to shore up the economy and the stock market at a time of massive debt, as well as the stark failures of our public-health planning, could make an activist government agenda much more politically palatable to Americans. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” as Rahm Emanuel once put it. And if a public-health catastrophe doesn’t bring home the need for effective universal health care, what could? This virus is also an opportunity for the left to move away from its unpopular woke identity obsessions toward a case for structural economic change fitting for the scale of the epidemic. For the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be spending much, much more time at home, or communicating entirely virtually. There will abruptly be less work to do, and less money coming in, and marriages under the acute stress of unending cohabitation. We will retreat into our online worlds, where viruses only affect computers, and withdraw from our neighbors when we could do with coming together. Good will happen too. Surely it will. The silence in the streets portends something new. The other day, I realized I’d been texting a lot less and calling a lot more. I wanted to make sure my friends and family were okay, and I needed to see their faces and hear their voices to be reassured. As we withdraw from each other in the flesh, we may begin to appreciate better what we had until so recently: friendship and love made manifest by being together, simple gifts like a shared joint, a head resting on your shoulder, a hand squeezed, a toast raised. These weeks of confinement can be seen also, it seems to me, as weeks of a national retreat, a chance to reset and rethink our lives, to ponder their fragility. I learned one thing in my 20s and 30s in the AIDS epidemic: Living in a plague is just an intensified way of living. It merely unveils the radical uncertainty of life that is already here, and puts it into far sharper focus. The trick, as the great religions teach us, is counterintuitive: not to seize control, but to gain some balance and even serenity in absorbing what you can’t. . . . There may be moments in this great public silence when we learn and relearn this lesson.