Judge the president on his own terms, the ones he set out as he ascended to the presidency and the ones he has espoused, as recently as a few months ago, as cause for his reelection.

Forget judging Donald J. Trump by the standard of American presidents who have led the country and the world through past crises. Ignore the moral courage of Abraham Lincoln as the nation stood divided, and the dogged vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt as he charted a path out of the Great Depression. And forget, for a moment, comparing the sitting US president to other leaders around the country and the globe — to Governor Jay Inslee of Washington or Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio, to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany or Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand — who have responded to this global pandemic with clarity, compassion, and early decisive action to protect their citizens.


In the president’s inaugural address, in January 2017, he said: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” The carnage he described was that of poverty, of children going uneducated, of factories “scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”

When in American history have our city streets and landscapes looked more like gravesites than today, under his watch? Classrooms around the country closed for the remainder of the school year leave the children he spoke of falling further behind. Poverty was rising and inequality at staggering, historic levels in the wealthiest nation on earth even before the pandemic hit; these ills are now poised to grow far worse. Factories across the heartland stand still as death. And then there are the thousands of people actually dying, more each day than from heart disease or cancer, as the coronavirus has become the country’s leading cause of death. This new American carnage, it bears repeating, was largely preventable.


Candidate Trump promised to protect the American people, pledging to seal the southern border with a wall. And yet he bungled the response to the most pernicious threat to arrive from abroad in decades. In late February, he promised “it’s going to disappear” and that the number of coronavirus cases in the country would fall from 15 to “close to zero” in a couple of days. Meanwhile, his administration failed to heed warning signs, roll out effective tests, prepare the public and hospitals, and coordinate a swift response as the case numbers surged to the hundreds of thousands.

Since he took office, the president has loved to point to ephemeral and often meaningless markers of his success — the television ratings of his press conferences, the latest unrepresentative poll, and the number of followers he has on Facebook. And until recently, he took credit for the economic boom times; he loved to tout the low unemployment rate and the rise of the stock market. Today, unemployment is at its highest rate in nearly a century and nearing that of the Great Depression. The recent rebound of the stock market — after it suffered a historic and precipitous dive under Trump’s watch — belies an economy besieged by deeper problems of rising corporate debt and income inequality and threatened by the long-term consequences of the outbreak that has cost millions of Americans their livelihoods, their health care, and their ability to spend and invest. The numbers that Trump boasted of boosting before the pandemic were a thin veneer for an economy growing more vulnerable.


The president has claimed his “total” authority over the states, and he lunges at acquiring the degree of power over the courts, the Congress, and the media enjoyed by authoritarians around the world. But even on this score, he is largely failing to achieve his aspirations. Governors around the country have earned the public’s trust in a way the president has not — notwithstanding a minority of restless protestors in the streets endangering their own health and the few state leaders who are falling in line with Trump and reopening their beaches and businesses. In the Midwest and on the East and West coasts, governors who in a previous era would have deferred to the federal government’s guidance in a global health crisis are instead drawing on their own sources of scientific expertise and forming coalitions to consolidate power and reaffirm their authority to decide when it’s safe for their residents to return to work. From Massachusetts to California, it has been governors who have given the public clear messages about social distancing, secured medical supplies, and planned for hospital surges — who have, despite the failed federal government response, taken matters into their own hands.

Even the widely reviled institution that is Congress is, by contrast to the president, ascendant. The parties have come together recently to agree on multiple relief packages — not because the president has a vision for getting us out of the economic catastrophe underway, but despite the fact that he lacks one.


On the other hand, the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr has bent to Trump’s will, in what has been a disturbing trampling of constitutional norms and democratic principles. Such moves, alongside the illegal withholding of military aid from Ukraine to serve his personal political interests and the recent holdup of aid to the World Health Organization, do not “Make America Great Again” as Trump has long promised to do. They undermine our democracy as a model for the world and weaken our ability to influence other nations and collaborate to combat transboundary problems, including this pandemic. By withdrawing the United States from the world stage, Trump risks a ricochet of the contagion and renders American exceptionalism a quixotic fantasy.

There is no need to compare Trump to some lofty ideal to see that he has failed. Long before the president took office, he defined his notion of a leader. In November 2013, he tweeted: “Leadership: Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.” Yet today he is pointing the finger at everyone and anyone but himself and his administration for the virulent spread of the coronavirus in the United States: the World Health Organization, China, state governors, Democrats.

And here is where he has a chance of succeeding at his own game: gaslighting the public about this pandemic so that he appears blameless for misleading citizens about the risk and for squandering two critical months in the US response.


The daily White House press conferences, for Trump, are not a venue to reassure the American public or reinvigorate its commitment to the social distancing measures that are saving lives across the country. They are an opportunity to continue the presidential campaign he started in 2015 and that he has not ceased since, to present his actions in a positive light so that he can one day inevitably claim that his response was “perfect.” Even as, outside the press room, he has been fomenting uprisings of protestors who are crowding public spaces across the country while a contagious disease is killing thousands.

The president has long shown disdain for and a desire to manipulate the enterprises of truth — whether science or the free press. And now his efforts, as Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway once put it, to offer “alternative facts” about his response to the pandemic are a blatant attempt to rewrite history as it happens.

His most ardent supporters may let him get away with it. But among the reluctant voters who gave him a try and those who doubted he could pose much danger, the truth may yet prevail.

The pandemic has laid bare that a president can deny the existence of gravity as he sits under the apple tree, but sooner or later the apples are going to fall. People are dying in this country, people who have family and friends of all political persuasions, and no one will be spared the economic devastation. Whether voters choose to see the truth, remember the history of this crisis, and hold the president accountable in November is an open question. But it is hard to believe a president who says the sun is shining as the rain pools at your feet.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter at @GlobeOpinion.