Just two weeks after President Donald Trump rallied conservatives to focus on the threat of socialism, his followers are splitting over the coronavirus pandemic.

On one side are those like Bill Mitchell, who dismiss it as nothing worse than the flu, and the drive to eradicate it as “climate change 2.0” — as in, a media-lefty mass hysteria. On the other side are pro-Trump fixtures like Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, who have been sounding alarms on the coronavirus since January, and are calling for harsher lockdowns and social distancing.

While the MAGA movement is divided over how seriously to take the coronavirus threat or how to tackle it, the message among his supporters is increasingly unanimous: If Trump fails to control the virus, prevent its spread and prove his leadership, much less save the economy, he will lose the election and cripple his movement.

Trump’s supporters elected him because they considered him a “wartime leader” who could fight against the swamp and the elites, so they expect the same against a truly invisible threat, said War Room host and former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam. “If, for a second, people think that he doesn't have that strength, or he doesn't have that fortitude, then it will become a problem,” he said.

The mounting health and economic risks from the coronavirus outbreak present a monumental political challenge for a group vowing to make America great again. With just less than eight months before a presidential election, Trump’s followers face the prospect that their core message — about deconstructing the “deep state” of government workers and transforming the nation’s power structure to serve everyday Americans — could collapse in a crisis environment.

“I would think that the very pro-Trump people maybe would like to downplay this, but actually, I don't even think that,” said Chris Buskirk, the editor-in-chief of the nationalist magazine American Greatness. “Because on this particular issue, the nationalist-MAGA crowd are all over the place. It’s totally individual.”

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The divide was in stark contrast on Fox News last week, as the crisis snowballed into the public eye. One host, Tucker Carlson, delivered grave warnings about the coronavirus. He accused officials — who his conservative audience “probably voted for” — of minimizing “what is clearly a very serious problem.” Another host, Sean Hannity, called it “fear-mongering by the deep state.”

Across Trump world are other attempts to deflect blame — following an approach used by the president himself in recent weeks, as he attacked the Obama administration and others outside his administration for his team’s response.

Jerry Falwell Jr. suggested that North Korea created the virus. A conference promising “supernatural protection from the CoronaVirus” [sic] through the “blood and power of Jesus” initially advertised that Trump’s White House faith adviser, Paula White, would speak. (White is not attending.) And the more grounded, less conspiratorial-minded in the Trump base still found ways to take aim at the Democrats and the media.

On Sunday night, as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were debating the response to the virus, Breitbart’s snarky homepage headlines questioned whether the septuagenarians were up to the challenge, while Newsmax’s John Cardillo openly targeted conservatives who were “enabling” the “leftists salivating at the power grab COVID-19 presents.”

“80 percent of these cases are mild, meaning you get common cold, like people are recovering. I just don't see the need for all the panic,” said Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier, who praised the fact that investors seemed to react positively after Trump’s speech in the Rose Garden. The Dow initially rose by nearly 2,000 points, but the industrial average and global markets have been highly volatile since.

The other half of MAGAland is urging their peers to look at the bigger picture.

“If you take that perspective, that it’s just the flu and it’s roughly the same thing that other people are going to get, and it’s probably going to have the same outcome, why would you want to have two separate viruses like that circulating at the same time as you can on that assumption?” Buskirk countered separately, worried about the potential strain on hospitals. (Admittedly, he joked, he had also been preparing for catastrophic events since 9/11.)

Other prominent figures in the loose confederacy of pro-Trump media recognized the potential for trouble. “That would be a massive vulnerability … if he started downplaying the disease again, and it were to get worse,” agreed Will Chamberlain, a pro-Trump commentator and the editor-in-chief of Human Events.

“Every president has the sort of out-of-the blue instances that happen that you can’t really plan for and it tests your leadership ability. It tests everything,” conceded Fournier. “And I think it is a fair assessment to say that the president has to exert strength here.”

Seth Mandel, the editor-in-chief of the conservative Washington Examiner magazine, noted that the rapid flip on the right from triumphal unity to existential terror happened in less than two weeks.

“I think, for a while, there was some degree of harmony in the conservative press,” he observed, pointing to the potential of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee bringing consensus to the movement prior to Super Tuesday. “If you're debating policy, then it looks like everybody’s pretty much on the same page, because whatever people think of Trump, they also don’t like socialism to a great degree.”

But over the next two weeks, that future shattered with the one-two punch of Joe Biden trouncing every candidate during the next 22 primaries, placing Sanders' campaign on death watch, and the sudden, complete shutdown of Italy over coronavirus fears, leading to Trump’s decision to shut down travel between much of Europe and the U.S. And now much of the nation is shutting down to save itself from the rapidly spreading outbreak.

While they applauded Trump’s earlier decision to ban travel from China, they still could not overlook the lack of testing and the CDC’s inability to mount a strong prevention campaign against the virus, and some criticized Trump’s initial messaging.

“Trump was comparing flu statistics to coronavirus statistics,” said Chamberlain. “Well, that’s the same mistake that people make when they say, ‘Why do you care more about terrorism? Terrorism kills so many fewer people in car accidents every year.’ The answer is, ‘Because if something goes really wrong in terrorism, they could do unbelievably dramatic damage.’ Same logic here.”



There was a consensus among Trump’s supporters that the crisis was precipitated by the two things that Trump had long railed against: open borders and the over-reliance on Chinese manufacturing. With the coronavirus, argued Chamberlain, Trump was proven right: Lax border security had allowed the virus to spread, and the shutdown of Chinese factories, particularly the ones that manufactured medical supplies and medicine, hobbled America’s ability to fight it.

“If Trump wants to pursue his normal, original nationalist agenda, there's nothing about the coronavirus crisis that would preclude him from doing so. If anything, it is evident that his agenda is the right one to pursue.”

While coronavirus presented a custom-built argument for economic nationalism, it was not the argument that Trump initially made — something that did not escape Mandel, who was flabbergasted that Trump did not spin himself as a “prophet” and instead tried to downplay it. “When the president had a crisis that hit that would have, theoretically, been designed perfectly for the nationalist argument, he didn't reach for it. So maybe he doesn't really believe it.”

Trump’s Friday afternoon speech in the Rose Garden, in which Trump announced a national emergency and displayed several private corporations to aid the CDC’s response, heartened his supporters, who applauded the fact that there was, at least, a conservative-friendly plan to combat the virus: a website for people seeking information about COVID-19, a public-private partnership with several corporations to fight the disease and, most importantly, the declaration of a national emergency, freeing up billions in federal funding. (The website, however, was not quite what Trump had initially sold: What was initially early discussions about a Bay Area pilot program for health care workers run by a Google-affiliated startup was inflated to a Google website with 1,700 employees that could help people self-screen for COVID-19 symptoms.)

To be sure, the health of the economy is indeed one factor in Trump’s re-election — a bar, Kassam pointed out, that the Trump campaign set for itself by touting the strength of the economy for the past three years as proof positive of his leadership. But most would forgive him if he didn’t restore the Dow to its recent soaring heights, as long as the markets were stable.

Fournier pointed to Trump’s post-address market rebound as proof that Trump was truly in control. “Today it’s a good day in America. Declaring a national emergency, releasing those funds, working with these other companies — this is the holistic solution,” he said.

Mandel doubted that Trump would lose the percentage of his base that would be with him no matter what during the coronavirus pandemic, but cautioned that Trump could not rely on press conferences and bolstering the economy forever.

“There’s the public health thing, and then there’s the economy part of it, and everybody should really be caring about the public health thing the most, but even he needs to presumably get some credit if the economy doesn’t tank,” he said. “And if it looks like he tried to save the economy at the expense of the public health aspect of it — if voters think that’s what he did, and also he failed at both — then yeah, you can imagine that it’s absolutely a real threat to his reelection. And again, he doesn't have Bernie to lean back on.”