Trump had no idea how to handle [the Covid-19 pandemic]. The virus did not respond to his favorite instruments of power. It could not be cowed by Twitter posts, overpowered by campaign rally chants, or silenced by playground insults. For so long, Trump had believed he could overcome nearly any obstacle through sheer force of will, and in many cases he had been astonishingly successful. Over the course of his seven decades, Trump had managed to bluster and bully his way past bankruptcies, failed business ventures, lenders demanding repayment, fraud and discrimination lawsuits, and, once he reached the White House, a special counsel and even congressional impeachment. But he could not will away a plague. So he tried denial, another favorite Trump tactic. That did not work either.
The emerging pandemic would expose all the weaknesses of his divisive presidency - his distrust of his own staff and the rest of the government, his intense focus on loyalty and purges, his penchant for encouraging conflict between factions within his own circle, his personal isolation, his obsessive war with the media, his refusal, or inability, to take in new information, and his indecisiveness when forced to make tough decisions.
Trump had always been indifferent to most substantive policy matters and skeptical of anything that experts, scientific or otherwise, told him. He turned everything into a political question whose answer was whatever would benefit him politically. And that is how he would approach this crisis too. "From the time this thing hit," said an adviser who spoke frequently with the president, "his only calculus was how does it affect my re-election."
- Peter Baker & Susan Glasser, The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, New York, 2022, p.37
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