You don’t want Mike Bloomberg in wartime, and you don’t want him in peacetime, but you might want him in a time of plague. A coronavirus outbreak is the one of the few circumstances that call for a bloodless authoritarian with effective management. Bloomberg would in short order have Purell stations on every corner and N95 masks on every face. Anyone who coughed would be whisked away to a treatment station on Molokai. We’d be through the worst of it in two weeks. If we could be sure he would then return to civilian life, like Cincinnatus to his plough, Supreme Leader Bloomberg might even get a roaring welcome. But in real life we’d have to deal with him for several more years. There’s the rub.

If trends hold, the coronavirus will soon upend daily life here in the United States. Schools in some cities will close for a while; supply chains will be disrupted; people will stay at home; and the economy will suffer a blow. Even now, stock prices have continued to fall, and surgical masks have been sold out for weeks. Yesterday, we could read about the first case of so-called community transmission, after a patient in northern California tested positive for coronavirus despite having no obvious link to anyone else with it. Despite assurances from Donald Trump this week that “we’ve had tremendous success” in containing the coronavirus outbreak, Americans are unconvinced.

Coronavirus is going to be everybody’s running mate in 2020, and the question is who will fare worst as a result. In what’s normally a zero-sum game, whatever hurts one candidate helps the other. But coronavirus won’t be so clear-cut. A lot depends on how bad things get and who is running against whom.

On the Republican side, we know we’re getting Trump, and early signs of his approach to the virus are unpromising. An engaged president would be on the phone daily with CDC officials, members of Congress, military leaders, cabinet officials, medical experts, and even companies like 3M, which produces the masks on which people will be relying. Trump instead sounded like someone who got a few scattered briefings. Asked about why the CDC—which, as feared, has been stumbling out of the gate—has tested only about 500 people, versus the thousands of tests being conducted in other countries, Trump couldn’t hide that he was winging it, answering, “Well, we’re testing everybody that we need to test and we’re finding very little problem, very little problem,” before going into a recitative about washing hands.

Trump has a reputation as a closed-borders germaphobe, but that can be a good thing sometimes, and pandemics are one such time. During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the governor of American Samoa, John Martin Poyer, avoided any outbreak or deaths by placing the island under strict quarantine. Western Samoa, under the looser stewardship of New Zealand, experienced the epidemic in full, losing over 20% of its population. Whatever hard feelings people might have had toward Poyer’s hard-line approach, it was vindicated. People understand the health hazards of open borders in times of crisis. But Trump hasn’t been sounding much of an alarm, for fear of setting off panic and seeing stock prices fall further, so life has continued as normal. He has no evident master plan, and yesterday he was trafficking in the-flu-is-worse clichés that were last in fashion weeks ago. He’d be better off as the border fanatic that people believe him to be.

If we get through the next couple of months without a big outbreak, then Trump will be in okay shape. While he might not get a lot of credit for preventing disaster (because people rarely do), he won’t suffer for it, and he’ll be able to boast of aggressive measures taken, regardless of what we did. If things get very bad, however, then Trump will have a tough time hanging onto office. We can see he knows this is a possibility, because he has appointed Mike Pence to oversee the federal response. This is a lot like China’s leader Xi Jinping assigning a similar task to Premier Li Keqiang. If things get bad, you can blame it on the bumbling lieutenant. Since Trump has been rumored to want someone else on his ticket, anyway, there’d be that plus. But the political damage of an epidemic would be severe. Bungling something at home is much worse than bungling something abroad. A few days of failure after Hurricane Katrina managed to hit the Bush White House harder than months of failure and lies in Iraq.