White House officials are reluctant to specify how many dead Americans are too many, but Sen. Lindsey Graham offered a number: “The closer you can have it to 120 [thousand deaths], I think you can say you limited the casualties in this war.”
But even beyond the death count, there’s a widespread reluctance to define what success means. “I’m not going to get into this game four or five months from now about what any particular metric needs to look like,” the official said.
Trump has repeatedly compared his pandemic response to fighting a war. “So it is a war and I define victory when it’s gone and we open successfully and we have a successful country again,” he said on May 1. “It can never be a total victory because too many people have died.” Others are slightly more optimistic that the overall number of deaths is less important than the trajectory of new cases and whether there are signs of an economic rebound. “Allowing people to get to some semblance of normal without a second wave occurring and the economy showing glimmers of hope would be a success,” argued one Republican close to the president.
The fear that Trump can’t survive a referendum on his handling of the crisis has allies pushing a series of change-the-subject strategies. The more the pandemic response becomes a polarized issue, the more that political narrative rather than raw statistics could matter.
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