There is much liberal hand-wringing around the world about how Donald Trump did not lose by the wide margins people thought he would. Trumpism continues to be a reality we have to deal with.
We are told that Trump won the counties worst affected by Covid, yet it cannot be denied that Trump’s undoing was his handling of the pandemic. The trouble was not just with the 2,30,000 lives lost until Election Day, but also an economy left ravaged by the pandemic.
Trump himself acknowledged this when he said in battleground Pennsylvania in October: “Before the plague came in, I had it made. I wasn’t coming to Erie. I would have called you and said, ‘Hey, Erie, you know, if you have a chance, get out and vote.’ We had this thing won!”
Donald Trump was certain to win the election until Covid struck. The unemployment rate was at a historic low. Wage growth was high. The economy was booming. Trump couldn’t stop reminding people to look at the stock markets. Then, a once-in-a-century pandemic struck. The stock markets fell reminding people of the Great Depression.
When Covid reared its ugly head, novelist Orhan Pamuk had been busy researching for a novel set in a pandemic. With that knowledge, he told us in April: “The history and literature of plagues shows us that the intensity of the suffering, of the fear of death, of the metaphysical dread, and of the sense of the uncanny experienced by the stricken populace will also determine the depth of their anger and political discontent.” The United States and the Indian state of Bihar are following this script.
Yet, Trump did not have to lose this election. He could have won hands down. All he had to do was learn from a politician far smarter than himself, his friend and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The comparison is also instructive in telling us why Modi isn’t Trump, and why Modi remains popular despite Covid having taken a high toll in India and ravaged the Indian economy as well.
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1. Crisis is opportunity: Leaders across the world panicked when Covid struck. Both the US and India, like Europe and Brazil, bungled their initial response. Asian countries adopted the test-trace-isolate strategy and thus contained the virus. India and the US failed to adopt this strategy early on, hence the virus spread into the community and Covid went out of hand. Yet, once the problem became clear, Modi took to the crisis in the way you expect strongmen politicians to: A Churchillian resolve to defeat the enemy.
Modi did not manage to defeat the enemy, but the optics was right. Not his fault, his voters can say. He did the best he could, imposing a national lockdown. Trump went into denial mode, which cost him his credibility among some of his own voters, especially older male White voters who were most prone to the virus. Trump should have treated the virus as a 9/11-like moment, acknowledging the fear in people’s minds and answering it with resolve for a rally-around-the-flag effect. His Covid denial instead made him look like a president not taking a war seriously. In 2016, Trump spelt out the enemy and showed a path to defeat it: the immigrants, the Muslims, the Chinese taking away jobs, the trade policies and so on. In 2020, Trump came across as taking the enemy (Covid) in a manner most un-presidential.
Trump privately knew Covid was “deadly”, but he made a wrong narrative calculation thinking it would help him to downplay it. Instead, he should have overplayed it. Modi, by contrast, compared the fight against Covid to the Mahabharata war. Strongmen leaders yearn for big crises to play the saviour. Trump could have won big if he had done that.
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2. Pass the buck: Once Trump realised he made a mistake in his Covid narrative, he could have passed the buck. That’s what Narendra Modi did. As India’s lockdown failed to wipe out Covid, Modi started to pass the buck onto the states. He started doing endless video conferences with state chief ministers, letting them speak at length and take responsibility.
Donald Trump, by contrast, kept coming across as silly in his Covid denial, not wearing a mask, holding rallies, insisting it wasn’t so bad, opposing lockdowns. All he needed was to shift the responsibility. With the festive season in India, the Modi government has already shifted responsibility further to the people. If Covid spreads, it will now be the people’s fault for not taking Modi’s warning seriously. Ask not what your prime minister can do for you but what you can do for your prime minister.
3. Strategic silence: No matter how big the noise over an issue, Narendra Modi won’t speak on it if it doesn’t suit his narrative. It is difficult to make Modi speak on lynchings or unemployment or demonetisation. He does so rarely, only when he is forced to, after a lot of noise, when it’s too little too late, the issue has lived its life in the news cycle, and no longer poses any narrative or electoral risk to him.
Trump, however, kept speaking about his biggest weak spot, Covid, saying it will just go away and is not a serious threat. When you know you have failed on something, don’t speak about it. But Trump couldn’t help himself, because he must stick to his tried-and-tested offence-as-defence strategy. If Modi was Trump, he would have been endlessly defending himself for forgetting about migrant labourers before imposing a lockdown.
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4. Distract and rule: The Modi government made sure people have something else to talk about so they don’t talk about the failure of the lockdown, the economic crash, mass unemployment and Indians being pushed back economically by years. The Modi government, with the help of mouthpiece media, used the alleged suicide of a Bollywood actor to spin a long yarn that went into relationships, drugs, intrigue, even murder allegations. India didn’t even care about devastating GDP figures that came out in that period. Trump needed his own Rhea Chakraborty to distract and win.
5. Be a populist for real: It is high time we should stop describing Donald Trump as an economic populist, because he didn’t turn out to be one. He promised to spend money building infrastructure but didn’t actually do it, partly because he gave corporates a tax cut instead of raising taxes to fund infrastructure. Just before the election, he didn’t sign a second stimulus deal with the Senate because of pressure from his party, which is ideologically opposed to giving out cash to people.
By contrast, Narendra Modi who was supposed to ‘less government, more governance’ gave farmers Rs 6,000 a year for free to win his 2019 election.
Imagine a politician who doesn’t put cash in people’s pockets before a pandemic-time election. Now imagine such a politician being called a populist.
6. Polarise to reduce opponent’s votes: Nobody knows polarisation better than Modi and the BJP. But polarisation succeeds when it increases your votes, not the opponent’s. You don’t polarise when you run the risk of counter-polarisation. So the BJP polarises against 14 per cent Muslims to try and unite 79 per cent Hindus in its favour. It seeks to create a sense of consensus, real or false, around hard-hitting issues such as Kashmir and Ram Mandir. Donald Trump’s insensitivity towards violence against African Americans helped fuel the Black Lives Matter movement. Yes, Donald Trump won a large number of votes, but the Democrats won even more, because Trump’s polarisation increased turnout on both sides.
The author is contributing editor to ThePrint. Views are personal.