On a Tuesday in late July, Jonathan Swan, a political reporter for Axios, conducted an interview with President Trump at the White House. Nearly five months into the coronavirus pandemic, Trump’s incompetent response was by then an inarguable historical fact, though Trump had done what he could to deflect blame. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said in March, regarding problems with U.S. testing. Since then he had pointed fingers at state governors, Democrats in Congress and the Chinese Communist Party.Swan’s young, guileless face and flatteringly deferential manner masked an inquisitor prepared to hold Trump to account. Early on, he brought up the “older people,” many of them at Trump’s rallies, who have “a false sense of security” because of Trump’s statements that the virus was under control and basic precautions were therefore unnecessary. His voice took on a pleading tone as he implored the president to consider the risks that the virus posed not to the country as a whole, but to Trump’s supporters in particular.
Trump, put by Swan in the unusual position of having to defend himself, turned into a Roman candle of incandescent, colorful excuses. “What’s your definition of control?” he asked Swan. Then he hunkered down. “I think it’s under control.”
“How?” Swan asked. “A thousand Americans are dying a day!”
“They are dying,” Trump replied. “That’s true.”They, not we — note the psychological distancing at work here. And yet Trump did not dispute the deaths themselves, their cause or the number. Swan had confronted him with one of the rare unwelcome facts that he did not have the audacity to deny.
“And you have —” Trump began. Then a second thought seemed to elbow its way in, and Trump interrupted himself. “It is what it is,” he said.These five words — it is what it is — are most often spoken privately, to close out a discussion on a note of stoic commiseration. They are odd ones to apply to a pandemic, especially one that is far from over. They are not a declaration of victory. They do not imply that everything is under control. Nor are these words often applied to a crisis that is still unfolding and could be made better or worse by crucial, life-or-death decisions that remain in your control. The formula is plain-spoken but also evasive; its tautological aspect works to push the details of the subject under discussion into the background. Nothing more can possibly be said about it, Trump seemed to be saying. And what would be the point? You already seem to know all about it. So why not declare this one a draw and move on?
Except in order for these five words to work their magic, the speaker must shut up. Trump did not. He was only flirting with the possibility of retreat. Instead of saying “it is what it is” with finality, his voice rose to meet Swan’s in those emphatic notes of pleading disputation that, like rumble strips on highway shoulders, mark the outer edge of civil conversation. “That doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can,” he continued. “It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.”
In this case, “it is what it is” served as a bridge between two contradictory ideas: It is under control and it cannot be controlled. Again, Trump blamed the governors. He blamed China. He acknowledged that the situation was “serious.” He said that his approach was to “handle it the best it can be handled.” If Trump could no longer paint the virus as a temporary ailment that would disappear on its own, by Easter, then it had to be an all-powerful juggernaut, inherently unmanageable, with one thousand deaths a day at the low end of the damage one might reasonably expect it to cause.Minutes later, Trump tried to shift away from counting deaths to counting cases. He pulled some charts from a side table and began rustling them in his lap. “The United States is lowest in ... numerous categories,” he said. “In what?” Swan asked. “Take a look,” Trump said. Almost instantly, Swan announced what Trump either could not or did not want to extract from his charts, which is that they were comparing deaths to proven cases, not deaths to population. This distinction put Trump back on more familiar ground. Now he could argue that Swan was using the wrong set of numbers to make things look worse than they actually were. Never mind that Trump himself had previously argued against the mass testing that he was now leaning on as a denominator to try to shrink the comparative ratio of deaths. And never mind that he had put himself in the position of rejecting the idea that counting dead versus living Americans was a fair measure of his government’s response. “No,” he said. “You can’t — you can’t do that. You have to go by the cases.” He pointed to the bar graph in his hand. The interview’s temperature was rising.
Swan brought up South Korea, which at the time of the interview had about 300 deaths, compared with roughly 150,000 in the United States. In other words, the U.S., with six times as many people as South Korea, had more than 500 times the coronavirus casualties. “You don’t know that,” Trump replied. He didn’t ask Swan where he was getting his numbers from. Instead, he asserted flat-out that Swan did not know. “I do,” Swan responded. “You don’t know that,” Trump repeated. “You think they’re faking their statistics?” Swan asked. “I won’t get into that,” Trump answered, as though he were in the possession of some secret proof. “I have a very good relationship with the country.” For now, the South Korea statistic was neither right nor wrong. It was simply something Swan had said but did not “know.” Just in case anyone had been left unconvinced, he repeated himself again. “You don’t know that.”
It’s worth considering the threshold that Swan’s interruptions and eye-rolls highlighted with such clarity — the threshold of what Trump is willing to acknowledge as true. One thousand Americans dying each day from the virus is something that he can, with effort, be prodded into accepting, because he is imaginative enough not to see those deaths as reflecting on the competence of the president of the country in which they happened to take place. It is what it is served to wash his hands of any connection to them. The South Korea comparison, on the other hand, implied a responsibility that could not be evaded. Therefore, it could not be metabolized by Trump as fact. You don’t know that.
Trump’s response to the virus is similar in many ways to the country’s own response to Trump himself — scapegoating foreign powers, denials of responsibility, overdue half-measures, rosy predictions that everything will return to normal soon. For now, it is what it is may define the realistic ceiling of possible American futures.
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