The Evolution from “The Only Thing We have to Fear is Fear Itself” to “The Only Thing We Have is Fear Itself”
I sat in utter amazement yesterday as I heard President Trump and his allies defend the indefensible. It had just been revealed, through taped conversations with Bob Woodward, that Trump was aware of the risks and transmission details of the corona virus as early as the first week of February, and yet decided that the best course of action was to lie to the American people about the potential ramifications. The explanation I heard yesterday for Trump’s approach was that he was attempting to project a sense of calm, strength, and control. Most importantly, it was claimed that there was a need to prevent fear and panic. We will evaluate the validity of this strategy, but the last point- that we need to prevent the country from being afraid- is astounding and clearly disingenuous.
From the moment that Donald Trump cartoonishly descended the Trump Tower escalator, he has been all about stoking fear in an attempt to align supporters to his cause. Each challenge this administration has faced has been met with a deflection of where we should look to be afraid. Do not forget the hordes of diseased migrants coming from the southern borders that never materialized. Nor forget the claims that MS-13 was going to move into your neighborhood. Nor ignore today’s clarion call to be afraid of “anarchists and leftists” taking over our cities and mythical laws that will change forever the demographic make-up of the suburbs. Everything about Trump’s administration and election strategy is designed to make us afraid for the purposes of firming up support among those who are susceptible to the message.
In the face of one of the greatest global and national challenges in a century, Trump has apparently decided that our best strategy for action is to ignore the real problem and go about our lives as if it is not really happening. The administration is telling us that concern over a real fear- illness, death, and economic collapse which will forever change our societal landscape- must be subservient to the fear of imagined events and boogie-men that might, if real, have a relatively small and short-term change in our comfort level. Is this an ingenious strategy being implemented by the administration, or is it intellectually lazy folly being wrought on the American people?
Let us begin this journey of discovery by understanding the recommendations for leadership in a crisis. We are being asked to assume that Trump’s pandemic communication goal has been to prevent Americans from having such tunnel vision concerning the virus that they lose sight of the greater needs of society and the economy and to begin to forsake for the future. We can largely agree that high-level concerns about hope and the future are well-placed, and certainly taking an election year position that the future is bleak is not a good starting point. Corona virus is hardly the first crisis to strike America, and many corporations have had to deal with existential issues over time. As a result, there have long been standard rules on how to communicate during a crisis in such a way as to maintain trust, lead people to safety, and enlist people to prepare for the future in a constructive fashion. These recommendations were most recently codified within the context of the corona virus by McKinsey, the management consulting firm, in an April 2020 publication (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/a-leaders-guide-communicating-with-teams-stakeholders-and-communities-during-covid-19):
- Give people what they need, when they need it.
- Communicate clearly, simply, frequently.
- Choose candor over charisma.
- Revitalize resilience.
- Distill meaning from chaos.
Governor Cuomo of New York has provided an example of how to effectively use the 5 criteria in his daily press briefings, as have other leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkle and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. On the other hand, President Trump has failed across the board on delivering against all 5 of these criteria:
- Give people what they need- the Trump message was never tailored to what citizens needed, nor was it empathetic to their situation. Each day was a similar inwardly focused diatribe of grievance and self-promotion, with greater emphasis on TV ratings than empathy towards the population.
- Communicate clearly, simply, frequently- the consistent message must be delivered about what definable steps we can take to reduce our risk as we go about our daily life. Instead, we were treated to an internally inconsistent word salad characteristic of the President’s communication style and his need to appear to be a winner at all times while others lose.
- Choose candor over charisma- failure in this step risks the credibility required when asking people to do difficult and uncomfortable things. We now know through the Woodward tapes that Trump consciously chose an attempt at charm over truth, and the price is measured in loss of life.
- Revitalize resilience- revitalization requires an acknowledgment of loss and a vision for the future as normality is recovered. Trump’s penchant for claiming that the crisis is under control against clear evidence to the contrary makes this element virtually impossible to implement
- Distill meaning from chaos- fixating on who is to blame and dividing the country encourages a chaotic response. Such activities do not generate meaning, but instead feed a sense of chaos that is exploited by the administration as fear.
We can examine real-time data to see how differences in messaging, candor, and enlistment of the population provide differential results against the same challenge. New York state, NZ, and Germany have all reduced deaths to below 3% of peak, while the US (not including New York) still remains with daily deaths greater than 50% of the peak rate.
The data show that New York, New Zealand, and Germany have been dramatically more effective than the US in combating the lethal impacts of the virus. There are many factors to take into account in this type of analysis, such as differences in medical care, socioeconomic health of the population, genetic diversity, etc., but one of the clearest differences is the message and actions of leadership. And in that, the data demonstrate that President Trump has been woefully inadequate.
Trump’s allies will undoubtedly point to FDR’s first inaugural speech wherein he stated that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” this quote being used as an example of a President who took the opportunity to project calm in a crisis where panic might have ensued. While that sentiment is valid, it also misses the context in which FDR defined the national fear as “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt was speaking specifically about stopping the runs on the banks that were crippling the ability to stabilize the economy. The rest of the speech succinctly outlines the steps that the new President planned to take, his commitment to honesty, and his call to citizens to work together to help him implement solutions. In other words, Roosevelt was not providing a panacea of calm over panic. He was laying out the plan for a better future and admonishing people to do the right thing for the country.
FDR’s rhetoric in no way mirrors that of Trump. While FDR advanced calm through honest evaluation of the situation and a vision for the future (encompassing all 5 elements above), Trump chose obfuscation and outright lying in an attempt to project leadership and calm. Trump argued that we should ignore what we saw around us. Instead, we should believe him that everything was fine, and all we needed to do was to ignore the experts with their science-based limitations on us and open the country with few limitations. One is reminded of Kevin Bacon as an ROTC recruit in Animal House, proclaiming that “All is well. Remain calm” while being trampled by a panicking crowd. The Trump argument did not work at the time and it clearly is not working now as the fatalities pile up. Fighting a pandemic is hard work requiring engagement of the whole country and sharing both blame and credit for the leaders. Trump has proven that he is incapable of managing such a process (more on why that is the case in a future post) and instead needed to find an alternative path- one of deflection.
In response to the failed corona virus response, Trump took the position that “fear itself” was the only way to regain control of the conversation. So he has spent the time that should have been devoted to protecting Americans instead to create a false narrative based on taking isolated incidents of violence and attempting to hang responsibility for the national ills onto a rotating set of societal slices (anarchists, Democrats, Black Lives Matter protesters, etc.), telling us to be afraid of them all.
Let us look at some more data. Trump has claimed that cities run by Democratic mayors have surging violent crime rates. There have been a number of studies of violent crime in US cities, and the results are hardly as simplistic as Trump has stated. Abt, Rosenfeld, and Lopez published a study earlier this year showing that 24% of the major US cities that experienced rising homicide rates in 2020 vs. 2017 had a Republican mayor. Jeff Asher of AH Datalytics has generated a list of 12 major US cities with Republican administrations that are showing between 4% and 89% upticks in homicides YTD, with an average increase of 26% that is the same as the increase across all major cities even accounting for the fact that 64% of the top 100 cities in the US have Democratic mayors. The data demonstrate that violent crime does not have a dependency on the political affiliation of the city leaders.
Mr. Trump has access to the best crime data in the world. Instead of asking his experts for reliable and accurate data, he has decided to jeer from the cheap seats, pointing out the latest boogeyman and trying to stoke fear of Democrats and those dwelling in cities run by them. But, as shown above, reality paints an entirely different story.
The politics of fear as opposed to policy leadership is an old page out of the autocrat’s playbook. Viktor Orban successfully ran for Prime Minister of Hungary on the platform of fear over the hordes of Muslim immigrants invading Hungary. It is helpful is understand that the Muslim population of Hungary was about 0.4%, and there were virtually no Muslim immigrants in the country. And yet he successfully managed to convinced people to vote on their fear. Current day Hungary is hardly the company we want to keep. Autocratic Hungary under Orban is crushing a formerly democratic nation. The Hungarian standard of living is close to the lowest in the EU (https://hungarytoday.hu/hungarys-standard-of-living-is-still-well-below-the-eu-average/), in no small measure thanks to Orban’s failed leadership. The goal of fear-based leadership is not to solve problems. Instead, it relies on telling you that “The Other” is coming to get you. Fear politics demand that you look away from the real dangers you face and the underlying injustices that cause complex societal problems. Because the target of the fear is not a real cause of society’s challenge, fear-mongers are able to generate an essentially empty pot in the minds of their believers into which they can place any number of falsehoods and division.
I began this post by asking the question of whether Trump had an ingenious strategy or was merely intellectually lazy and incapable of developing the sophisticated approaches that can address crises with minimal loss of life and treasure. My answers, after examining the data and listening to the language, is that he is, in fact, intellectually lazy. But as citizens, we do not have to follow in his footsteps. We all have a role to play in getting the country back on track so that we can focus on the true problems at hand. Rather than accepting the current leadership narrative, listen for key incendiary words that are designed to draw us apart. What usually follows is an attempt to distract and deflect. For instance, there is no “extremist” political party or way of thinking. Anyone who tells you to be afraid of extremists is merely drawing a distinction between the speaker’s beliefs and those of others; in a democratic society, that should not be frightening. Finally, believe in the power of truth and seek it out through your own efforts. Not everyone on the Internet has your best interest at heart.
