Adnan Khan, a veteran foreign affairs journalist who frequently writes for Canadian magazine Maclean's, has written a new column called "The Unmasking of Donald Trump," in which he declares that the novel coronavirus crisis has revealed the president to be an empty shell of a human.
Khan begins by walking through the ways that Trump has so often managed to bluff and bully his way out of potential disasters, ranging from casino bankruptcies to IRS inquiries.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the president has met the one problem that he can't simply make go away by talking.
"As a businessman, even as incompetent as he was, Trump had been able to maintain the illusion of invincibility," he writes. "The masks never came off... But as president, the opposite has happened: he has been steadily unmasked."
As this has happened, Khan argues, his approval rating has dropped and more and more voters are eager to show him the door. This, in turn, causes the president to double down on appealing only to his most committed fans, which then further alienates people who aren't fully aboard the Trump train.
"Finally, we are seeing the real Donald Trump, and it is a sad, frightening, unhinged image indeed," he concludes.
