Josh Kraushaar writes:

A fundamental rule of politics is the party that’s divided is the one that’s losing. A cardinal rule of pandemic politics is that it’s better to err on the side of caution instead of taking risks that would invite a political backlash. There are no libertarians in a crisis, but there will be lots of angry voters if a public official’s ideological commitments lead them to make decisions that endanger public health.

President Trump has brazenly broken both those rules in the past week. He has divided his party by publicly flouting his own administration’s guidance on when states should start reopening, instead encouraging protests against several states’ stay-at-home orders. He’s not discouraging some Republican governors who are planning to open up their states well before the coronavirus has been contained. And he’s now attacking one of the most popular Republican governors in the country, Maryland’s Larry Hogan, for procuring a half-million coronavirus tests from South Korea, outside the sclerotic federal chain of command.

Typically during a crisis, leaders try to build as much bipartisan goodwill as possible to hedge against the inevitable recriminations to come. Trump, by contrast, relishes in embracing polarizing positions that only divide voters and make his political recovery all the more difficult in the future. By turning the coronavirus crisis into a partisan issue so quickly, Trump ensures that he’s on the losing side of the debate. [Continue reading…]