In my March 18 entry, "The Problem with Trump," I argued that the primary negative of Trump as president was his unfortunate significance as a role model. More than any policy decisions or plutocratic power grabs, his presence on the world stage as a role model to a billion children was the worst of all Trump presidency effects. I also argued that relying on a man with little behavioral discipline to spearhead a period of unprecedented communal discipline was a really bad idea.
Here we are, one month later, and President Trump's lack of any semblance of behavioral discipline has been center stage. He is told there is no solid hydroxychloroquine evidence; he promotes the drug anyway. He is told that mask-wearing is a good idea; he refuses to wear a mask. He frames daily press conferences as if they were Days of Our Lives episodes with villains and heroes. He is confronted with his own embarrassing predictions; he attacks the people who remember what he said.
He behaves like most stereotypical villains facing Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, or Clint Eastwood for the last 30 years, but lacks the behavioral discipline of the more formidable ones.
Consequences
Trump as role model has come home to roost. Protesters in Michigan on Wednesday and Kentucky on Thursday appear to have as much behavioral discipline as the president. A few weeks of stay-at-home to save lives is evidently more than these Americans can stomach. I'm not sure how they'd handle the London Blitz. And then today, Friday, the president tweets "Liberate" to various states with an unbelievable disregard for virus or violence consequences.
Americans may be, quite frankly, too addicted to their consumerism to manage this pandemic optimally. Italians, Spaniards, South Koreans -- all locked down with solid no-nonsense measures and responsible, mature populations. Americans, not so much. For us, the "freedoms" of heading to Wal-Mart, drinking beer at the local sports bars, and sitting down in McDonald's are evidently too powerful to resist. The synergy between a civilian populace lacking behavioral discipline and a president woefully deficient in same is undeniable.
Maybe all of this was inevitable. In 2020, the lack of a mandatory military/civilian service probably plays a role. Americans distrust experts and something called a "deep state" because they manage lifetimes without interacting much with either. As such, any expertise that lies outside of our own life experiences is considered both alien and unwanted. If the president doesn't read, why should I? If the president can quote "hunches" and "being a genius" as rationale for his decisions, why should I put in hundreds of hours of research? If the president can point to his own temple as the source of his expertise on virtually every subject, why shouldn't everyone? These are the issues with Trump as role model.
Other nations must look at Americans and roll their collective eyes. Homeowners in the United States have the second most average floor space per person, behind only Australia. France, Japan, the UK, and Italy, for example, all have about half the per capita square footage of American homeowners. Yet Americans find staying at home a terrible hardship.
The amplifying effect of a consumerism-addicted, undisciplined populace led by an undisciplined mirror image is going to be a major problem going forward. Because a good chunk of Americans refuse to recognize expertise and instead follow a caricatured echo of themselves, the foundation will be laid for second, third, and fourth waves of this pandemic.
April 17, 2020
Bob Dietz
