President Donald Trump authoritarian tendencies blinds him to the realities of the coronavirus pandemic.
Authoritarian governments paradoxically tend to be unaware of what's happening despite their all-encompassing surveillance, because people are afraid the truth -- and that same blindness is hampering the Trump administration's response to the outbreak, according to The Bulwark's Robert Tracinski.
"This phenomenon was a factor in the Chinese government’s initial response to the COVID-19 outbreak," Tracinski writes. "Because an authoritarian system is designed to suppress information, rather than absorb it, the doctors on the front lines who initially warned about the disease were ignored and sometimes punished."
Trump blinds his own administration by dismissing unflattering information as "fake news" or partisan attacks from the "deep state," which gives his supporters permission to ignore anything that doesn't prop up the president.
"The practical effect of these two concepts is that they create a voluntarily accepted, self-induced authoritarian blindness, in which the administration and its circle of sycophants will accept no information from outside their bubble," Tracinski writes.
Trump has been treating the COVID-19 outbreak as more of an economic and political crisis than a public health emergency, Tracinski writes, and he has so far demonstrated no ability to understand or even engage the truth.
"Regardless of the outcome of this outbreak, we have already seen the basic weakness of Trump’s administration: its slowness and reluctance to respond to any information outside its bubble," Tracinski writes. "If it’s not this crisis, it will be some other crisis: the economy, our disastrous capitulation to the Taliban, or just some ordinary back-and-forth during the campaign."
"Trump won’t know he’s losing independent voters until they are already lost," Tracinski adds, "because the only people he listens to are those who tell him he’s doing great and that all the voters think he’s a very stable genius."
