The New York Times Magazine - USA (2020-08-23)

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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 fi ve words
to work their magic, the speaker must
shut up. Trump did not. He was only
fl irting with the possibility of retreat.
Instead of saying ‘‘it is what it is’’ with
fi nality, his voice rose to meet Swan’s in
those emphatic notes of pleading dispu-
tation that, like rumble strips on high-
way 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 gov-

ernors. He blamed China. He acknowl-

edged 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 tem-

porary ailment that would disappear on

its own, by Easter, then it had to be an all-^

powerful juggernaut, inherently unman-

ageable, 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... numer-

ous 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

The United States,

with 4 percent

of the world’s

population, accounts

for 25 percent of

global coronavirus

cases and 22

percent of deaths.