Is coronavirus helping Donald Trump’s bid for re-election?
Donald Trump has been under constant criticism from the media ever since taking office. Now, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, this love and hate relationship is fast reaching another level of irritation.
Trump and the media don’t always get along, Trump is constantly at loggerheads with reporter. and journalists, particularly those from mainstream outlets that do little to hide their liberal, alt-left bias. Those who he feels are trying to undermine everything he’s done in his first term in office, using the coronavirus pandemic as a referendum on his presidency. Not for nothing, his “fake news” claims serve as a mantra that his supporters echo with unabashed enthusiasm and fervor.
Most recently, Trump got himself into a spot of bother during a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing last week, with bizarre remarks about “injecting disinfectants” and using “ultraviolet light” to cure coronavirus.
Whatever the intention behind those comments was, suffice it to say they didn’t go down very well; and attempts made by Trump the following day in an Oval Office session to chalk them to simple “sarcasm,” directed at reporters, only gave the media’s political analysts more material to cross-examine against a backdrop of video evidence of the initial briefing that ran incessantly. As if it were some real-life ‘Whodunnit’ that the clever private eyes in the mainstream newsrooms of CNN and MSNBC, amongst others, solved.
The overriding opinion was that this time things backfired spectacularly for Donald Trump. The claim further supported by opinion polls that show Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, nudges ahead of Trump for the race to the White House.
A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, which was conducted this week with respect to the general election matchup between Trump and Biden revealed 44% of registered voters saying they would back Biden in the election, with 40% saying they would support Trump.
The ‘America first’ president, however, doesn’t feel that the 2020 US Elections will amount to a referendum on his handling of the coronavirus crisis. “I don’t believe the polls,” Trump said. “I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don’t think that they will put a man in who’s incompetent.”
Trump couldn’t refrain from expanding on his opinion further in his typical, blunt fashion, “And I don’t mean incompetent because of a condition that he’s got now. I mean he’s incompetent for 30 years. Everything he ever did was bad. His foreign policy was a disaster,” Trump said.
Trump isn’t a fan of his presumed opponent, often referring to him as “Sleepy Joe” or “Creepy Joe.” That he would reject the idea of Biden leading the polls isn’t a surprise. After all, he beat the polls in the previous election to the chagrin of his supporters.
Indeed, even bookmakers would appear to agree with the incumbent president right now, with political betting markets showing Trump having the edge over Biden to win the 2020 US Elections. Trump is tipped as the 10/11 favourite to win while Biden trails behind Trump at odds listed at 5/4.
Of course, politics, like many other systems, is ever represented by a fluid market. Nothing is static where betting politics is concerned and things could change very quickly with each passing hour and day. It’s a long way to the elections, which are set to get underway on Tuesday, November 3.
For example, there was a brief moment, last month, when Biden did actually overtake Trump on the political odds board. The move came immediately on the heels of the public endorsement of Biden’s bid by U.S. President Barack Obama. Alas, the bonhomie didn’t last long, and since that fleeting moment Biden has slipped back into Trump’s shadow in political markets.
What impact the coronavirus pandemic will ultimately have on the US 2020 Elections remains to be seen. For now, it doesn’t appear to be hurting Trump’s campaign for a second term in office.