Donald Trump spent the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic assiduously downplaying its severity. In late January, he told a Michigan crowd, “We have it very well under control.” At a rally in February, he declared that “by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” A mere three weeks ago, he claimed that new cases were “going very substantially down, not up.” And here he was at last Friday’s grinning, backslapping Rose Garden press conference: “Some of the doctors say it will wash through, it will flow through. Interesting terms, and very accurate.”
The terms, I hardly need to say, were not accurate. But Trump’s message appears to have reached his core audience, with the help of Fox News. (Witness House Republican Devin Nunes telling Fox Business viewers on Sunday that “it’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant.”) According to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, only 40 percent of Republicans believe the coronavirus is “a real threat,” compared to 76 percent of Democrats. Fifty-four percent of Republicans say it’s “blown out of proportion.” That’s consistent with earlier polling that suggests Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to call reports about the seriousness of the outbreak “generally exaggerated.” Meanwhile, in the 27,000-member Facebook group IAFF Union Firefighters for Trump, as ProPublica recently reported, posts abound suggesting that fears over the pandemic are being stoked by Democrats to affect the election—echoing Trump’s own claims from a February rally that making a big deal out of the virus was “their new hoax.”
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The schoolbook story of democracy is that political figures compete to cater to voters’ demands. But what we seem to be witnessing is the process by which, in an era of extreme partisanship, political leaders themselves shape the beliefs and priorities of their constituents.
In that sense the epistemic trajectory of the pandemi