So our question for today is: What is the appropriate attitude toward Donald Trump in a time of national crisis?
A) Rally around the president.
B) Tell your friends about the pandemic response team he dismantled.
C) Put your head down and watch 200 repeats of “Modern Family.”
Come on, get your head up. I know this is tough. It’s definitely a time for Americans to come together. On the other hand, complaining about Trump is sort of ... our way of life.
“It’s the last pleasure I have,” whimpered one of my housebound friends.
Compromise: Every time Trump irritates or appalls you, write it down in your Coronavirus Diary. After this is all over, we’ll have a contest for the best collection.
Meanwhile, try to divert yourself. Read a great book. Or something less challenging — I hear the “Twilight” series was vastly underrated, and this might be a good time to consider bringing back vampires. Or have extremely long discussions about Tom Brady leaving the New England Patriots. Even if you don’t know who Tom Brady is, you’ll find it’s soothing.
(The coronavirus has been pretty sneaky in managing to simultaneously keep everybody home and end all TV sports. Millions of Americans who don’t watch anything but ESPN are trapped in their living rooms, confronted with nothing but talking heads and mixed martial arts repeats from foreign lands.)
And try to think positive: The governors and mayors are working hard, and Trump’s actually helping some of them out. Congress just passed a coronavirus aid package. There are still a lot of deep-state survivors in the federal government who know what they’re doing. Things could possibly, conceivably, be worse.
But don’t go overboard! I am thinking here of Mike Pence, who’s in charge of the government’s coronavirus response. This is obviously a very important task, and every day Pence appears at a special press conference to tell us what’s going on while mentioning his boss’s name as often as humanly possible. Once you start counting, it’s hard to focus on anything else.
On Wednesday Pence scored a very impressive 16 references to “President Trump,” “the president” and “Mr. President” in four minutes. Shortly below Tuesday’s record of 19 — or 26 if you count answers to two reporters’ questions. Still, you can’t say the man isn’t trying.
Trump himself started off with an insult to China. (“Thank you very much. I would like to begin by announcing some important developments in our war against the Chinese virus.”) The White House and Beijing are having an unseemly who-started-it fight, and the president is trying to get even with a Chinese ministry that claims American soldiers brought the disease to Wuhan during an athletic competition.
Whom would you rather blame, people?
A) China.
B) Bats.
C) Jared Kushner.
No fair picking Kushner. He did help write the Oval Office speech that had everybody swooning with terror. But we are absolutely not going to call it the Jared virus.
Sometimes, it’s not clear exactly how much the president is focusing on all the bad news. His reelection arm is still sending out emails to the troops that focus on things nobody should be thinking about, like the wall, and things that are going to look very sad very soon. (“Brought unemployment numbers to a record low.”) Even his enemies do not want to think that at this point in history, the president is wandering around the Oval Office muttering about Mexico and last month’s economy.
We will not mention that one of Trump’s biggest non-virus accomplishments of the month was appointing the administration’s fourth chief of staff. One big plus is that you won’t have to learn who he is before he’s gone.
Trump and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who were having a tweet war earlier in the week, are now apparently buddies. Or at least on speaking terms. “With respect to Governor Cuomo, we had a great talk this morning,” the president said during one of the coronavirus press conferences. “We’re both doing a really good job.”
Yeah, in an ideal world Trump would have said Cuomo is doing a good job and then waited for the governor to return the compliment. But you cannot expect the crisis to strip our president of his self-regard. We will all go before the ego.
Trump does seem aware that it was a bad idea to tell reporters that he rated his coronavirus performance 10 out of 10. Instead, Wednesday he tossed the ball to ... the polls. “I see that they’re very high,” he noted modestly. “I’m beating Sleepy Joe Biden by a lot.”
OK, not a strong point for presidential transformation.
We’re so distracted, a lot of people failed to notice that Tuesday Joe Biden continued his lockup of the nomination. Won Florida! And Arizona! And ... some other stuff.
Think about it. Last month Biden, who had never won a single primary in three campaigns for president, came in fifth in New Hampshire. That was February, and look at him now. Feel free to see this as a sign that when things seem most terrible, it might just be time for a turnaround.
Bernie Sanders says he is not ending his campaign. He is “assessing.” As are we all, Bernie.
Gail Collins
Gail Collins is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.
