WASHINGTON — It wasn't always going to come down to the coronavirus.
Less than a year ago, President Donald Trump was reaching new heights in public polling and setting fundraising records. His job approval, especially on the economy, suggested he was well-positioned to win reelection.
But the arrival of a once-in-a-century pandemic in March forever changed the 2020 campaign, upending Trump's presidency and jeopardizing his candidacy.
His mission since that time has been to do all he can to effectively declare an end to the pandemic by Election Day.
Trump has built his political brand on his willingness to defy the advice of experts, pundits and his own political advisers. The coronavirus has challenged that inclination like never before, creating new economic and scientific realities inconvenient for him but impossible for the general public to ignore.
Polling shows COVID-19 remains the top priority for most likely voters, and less than 40% approve of Trump's response to the crisis — a number that has remained stable since the summer.
And the president's insistence that the nation is "rounding the corner" of the pandemic, despite all evidence to the contrary, has hurt him with the voting groups that he needs the most. Senior citizens and suburban women, two core blocs in his winning 2016 coalition, are fleeing him in droves.
"Any strategist would tell you that it is not a wise way to go to make your closing argument in your campaign by telling people that what they're going through is not as bad as how they say and feel it is," said Jim Gerstein, a veteran Democratic pollster.
"The idea that the pandemic is improving or is not a big deal, and the effort to downplay it, is the latest example of how disconnected his positions and statements are from the reality that people are living in," he said.
Trump poured billions of dollars into a vast federal program, compared within the administration to the World War II-era Manhattan Project, to speed up the development and deployment of drug therapies and vaccines, and promised a miracle "cure" would arrive by Nov. 3. He secured the most expensive stimulus package in American history, and pushed for the reopening of schools and businesses.
But on the eve of the election, no vaccine has arrived. Only one therapeutic has reached the market, and some health experts warn it is of questionable value and in limited supply. While job losses attributed to COVID-19 were not as dire as once predicted, the length of the outbreak has led many temporary job losses to become permanent. No additional aid has come from Washington as the nation enters a daunting winter phase of the pandemic. And schools are closing again.
As a result, Trump is heading into Election Day fighting for his political survival and portraying victory over the virus that a majority of Americans still see as a threat.
The spread of the coronavirus is accelerating. Cases are hitting new daily peaks nationwide and are on the rise in 42 states. Some battleground states are reaching hospital capacity.
Just four weeks before Election Day, a White House outbreak of COVID-19 hospitalized the president and infected his family and several top aides.
Trump's campaign advisers thought he would emerge from that episode humbled. Instead, he doubled down on a message dismissive of a disease that has taken over 230,000 lives in the United States.
"They've settled on the message being, 'don't panic, we're going to get through this, and it's not as serious as the media would have you believe,'" said Joe Grogan, former director of the Domestic Policy Council under Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force until he resigned in May.
"The president has defied the advice of the political messengers from 2016 when he was running and throughout his time in the White House — he's not going to change now," Grogan said. "Frequently, he triumphs over the conventional wisdom."
'MIND OVER MATTER'
Despite Trump's repeated promises to deliver emergency authorization for experimental therapeutics and access to a vaccine before the election, scientists and regulators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration have aggressively pushed back against a timeline they feared was motivated by politics and could compromise safety and public trust.
One senior CDC official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told McClatchy that the agency had dealt for months with a "mind over matter" approach from the White House that ignored — and at times attempted to revise — the realities of the pandemic.
With their FDA colleagues, CDC officials have been forced to navigate the public health crisis under leadership whose demands grew increasingly political as the campaign entered its final stretch.
"We always thought that a vaccine by Election Day wasn't ever a realistic thing," the CDC official said. "I think we were all trying to figure out how it would work if people were forced to make those decisions."
Trump's push to make a vaccine available before the public health and clinical experts, regulators and companies were ready to proceed was only one of several points of tension between the president and scientists.
While Vice President Mike Pence, who has led the White House coronavirus task force since February, initially put the nation's infectious disease experts at the forefront of the administration's response, group meetings began scaling back in May as Trump pushed for a more positive message.
The president has not been briefed by the task force in over a month, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert and a task force member, said in recent days that the administration had given up attempting to control the spread of the virus. "Right now, the public health aspect of the task force has diminished greatly," Fauci told The Washington Post.
Trump's refusal to unequivocally endorse mask-wearing — which Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC director, said could still cut the U.S. death toll by tens of thousands — has persisted throughout the closing days of the campaign, with the president repeatedly questioning whether masks are effective at stopping the spread.
"I never would have predicted that a pandemic could be made into a political issue, where people would really fall into two sides on whether it makes sense to wear a mask or not, when the science is all on one side," said Dr. Ed Nardell, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health and an expert on airborne diseases. "I think the feeling is shared by most people I know in public health that our performance has been abysmal."
Trump campaign officials told McClatchy that the president has supported a rigorous, independent review process for COVID-19 drugs and has encouraged mask-wearing. "President Trump wants everyone to be safe and take precautions," said Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the Trump campaign, "but we cannot allow the coronavirus to drive us into the basement and lock the country down again."
"The message on COVID is clear," Boris Epshteyn, strategic adviser to the Trump campaign, told McClatchy in a recent interview. "If you look at everything the president's done on COVID, he's done everything possible to keep as many Americans safe, secure, protected and employed."
The message rests on a narrative that he confronted the spread of the novel coronavirus early on by imposing travel restrictions on China, where the virus originated, in February. Those restrictions were porous, however, and epidemiologists later found that the virus likely arrived and began spreading within U.S. communities in January or December. Trump initially praised Chinese leadership as having the situation "under control."
The president's aides note that his administration was quick to ramp up production of protective equipment and ventilators early in the pandemic, moves that earned him praise from Democratic governors at the time.
But Trump's initial aggressive approach to the crisis once it became apparent in March faded quickly into one of deference to the states, as his aides focused on how to revive a devastated economy ahead of the election.
That effort has led to some gains. Jobless claims are at their lowest since the pandemic began, and the unemployment rate has nearly halved since it peaked in April. But economic growth remains slow — including in hard-hit battleground states such as Pennsylvania — and the president has failed to get Republicans to agree to another stimulus package after the CARES Act passed in late March.
Trump's fevered push to reopen the economy, despite repeated public and private warnings from top scientists on his own coronavirus task force, has contributed to the distrust that has deepened his political troubles.
"We are in a place where the public health messages are very clear for what people need to be doing to protect themselves and perhaps more importantly others from COVID, and that has not been modeled effectively by the president and others at the top of government," said Dr. Laura Jarmila Rasmussen-Torvik, chief of epidemiology in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
In his final campaign stops, Trump told mask-less attendees at packed rallies that the end of the pandemic is near.
"The message is what it is — there is a window for optimism and a 'light at the end of the tunnel' message," Grogan said. "Is it modulated perfectly? I have personal opinions, but if it cost me five bucks every time I had second guessed the president's message, I would've been poorer every day at the White House."
LOSING KEY VOTERS
In the closing weeks of summer, after coronavirus surges had rippled through several states, the Trump administration made an unqualified pitch to state and local officials: open up your schools.
It was a gamble that concerned epidemiologists, but one that explicitly targeted white suburban women across the country whose support for Trump's reelection had dropped precipitously since the pandemic began.
"We're getting your kids back to school," Trump said in Lansing, Michigan, last week, promising to "save suburbia" at a campaign rally. "Your husbands, they want to get back to work, right? We're getting your husbands back to work, and everybody wants it."
Surveys conducted over the last six weeks show support from suburban women have swung over 20 points away from Trump since 2016, including in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, where Trump narrowly won the demographic four years ago but now appears to be trailing his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, by double digits.
The push to open schools was only one part of a larger strategy to steer the national conversation to a coming economic revival, a return to pre-pandemic normalcy and a political landscape that had only months ago favored Trump.
"The administration's coronavirus strategy is fundamentally rooted in the bedrock objective of saving lives and helping our country safely open and stay open. As the president has said, the cure cannot be worse than the disease," said Michael Bars, a White House spokesman. "We now have more information on how to better treat patients and protect the most vulnerable."
One key voting bloc was not ready to pivot its focus away from the crisis at hand.
Voters in the 65-and-over age group, who were key to Trump's victory four years ago and are most susceptible to serious illness from COVID-19, soured on the president in the campaign's final weeks, with polls showing a swing of up to 23 points toward Biden.
Bars told McClatchy that the administration has succeeded in bringing the mortality rate down to 1% from COVID-19 at nursing home facilities, which early in the pandemic drove the national death toll. Still, the United States is seeing an average 1,000 deaths a day.
"Seniors have been disproportionately impacted by this pandemic — they've been isolated. They are getting sick and dying alone, and can't even attend their friends and family members' funerals," said Michael Steel, longtime press secretary to former Republican House Speaker John Boehner. "Pretending it isn't happening doesn't change it."
