Cultural political economy, crisis management, and COVID-19 in the United States Open Access

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has ravaged the world. The pace at which this pandemic spread left policy makers scrambling to understand the virus and craft ameliorative policy measures, while populations struggled to make sense of the pandemic’s impact on their lives. This opened up many opportunities for crisis learning. This article deploys the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach to analyse discursive and material ways in which the President of the United States engaged in crisis learning and crisis management during the early months of the pandemic. Although preexisting conditions structured the early response to COVID-19, contingent moments of (in)action by the President had significant, path-shaping impact on the scope and severity of the pandemic. A vignette on the functionality of the US healthcare system during the early days of the pandemic offers further clarity on the interplay between material and discursive factors impacting real-time crisis learning and management.

On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (2020) was alerted to ‘a pneumonia of unknown cause’ deriving from China’s Hubei province. One week later, doctors in China successfully performed a genome sequencing of the novel coronavirus [2019-nCoV], and several days later this sequencing was shared with the world to analyse this emergent public health issue (Hui et al., 2020). By January 30, the coronavirus disease (henceforth COVID-19) reached 19 different countries and the WHO declared this a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ (WHO, 2020). The rapid pace at which COVID-19 spread throughout 2020 impacted the world in a profound way. By 15 November 2020, there were at least 55.6 million confirmed cases worldwide and the US was the worst affected country, with over 11.5 million confirmed cases (Worldometer, 2020a, 2020b). Thus, the initial response to COVID-19 represented an emergent period of crisis learning. People were forced to rapidly learn what was going on, how it would impact their life, and what policies might be implemented to prevent the illness from impacting all domains of society. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and member of The White House Coronavirus Task Force, illustrated this point clearly during a press conference on 29 February 2020, when he said ‘we want to underscore that this is an evolving situation. And in real time, we will keep you appraised of what is going on’ (The White House, 2020a).

The process of crisis learning is one with myriad material and discursive moments (Jessop, 2015a, 2018). The material moment is seen in job losses, the onset of economic recession/depression, hardship acquiring essential goods, travel restrictions, the physical manifestations of sickness, etc. The discursive moment evolves in tandem and in relation to the materiality of the moment, with politicians, pundits, think tanks, and neighbours alike offering their thoughts on what was unfolding, how much attention COVID-19 warranted, what policies might best address them, and the very matter of discerning whether a certain moment in time even is a crisis. How people contingently make sense of shifting circumstances during the early stages of a crisis is structured by a variety of prevailing material and discursive conditions but also opens possibilities for ideas heretofore considered unpalatable to now be considered acceptable, perhaps desirable.

This article offers a case study of the earliest months of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020; approximately mid-January through mid-April. To do this, it deploys the cultural political economy approach (CPE), which studies the dynamic relationship between material and discursive factors as they co-evolve and (re)structure society. CPE has gained increasing popularity across Europe over the past decade but remains underexplored within US social sciences (for exceptions, see Levy & Spicer, 2013; Mueller & Schmidt, 2020; Schmidt & Mueller, 2020). However, its interest in collective and individual processes of meaning-making and its relationship to the institutional, market-based, technological, and media-based structures in which we are immersed crafts an intellectual bridge for numerous areas of inquiry (e.g. cultural sociology, political sociology, and social movement studies, to name a few possibilities). Agreeing with Jessop’s (2015b, p. 245) appraisal that crises ‘offer [us] a real-time laboratory’ to understand the relational dynamics social change, this article will serve as a useful intervention on the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, helping us understand mechanisms of crisis governance in the United States.

The CPE approach is used to analyse in detail key policy choices and (in)actions of President Trump that exerted path-shaping effects on the evolving crisis scenario. It illustrates the conditions facilitating the construal of what kind of crisis this was, how actors learned about the crisis in real-time (i.e. experiencing/being-in the crisis), and how actively actors managed the crisis in real time. It also unveils how scientific, narrative, and pragmatic elements of Trump’s crisis construal related to one another, and shifted over time in response to emergent circumstances. After paying close attention to some of these subjectively indeterminate moments, I outline the objectively overdetermined factors that structured the crisis response. Therefore, this article not only illustrates President Trump’s ability to engage in (inter)subjective processes of meaning-making and policy-crafting, but it contextualises this by locating the structural and conjunctural factors that conditioned his political choices. I conclude with a discussion on areas of research to which this paper makes a substantive contribution, and with which it may enter future dialogue for COVID-19 research and beyond.

The data collection and analysis is guided by concepts found in comparative and historical sociology, and abductive analytical approaches. I draw upon primary and secondary sourced documents, including transcripts and press releases from President Trump and the Coronavirus Task Force, journalistic reporting on the crisis as it unfolded, the CDC, WHO, and the Worldometer’s coronavirus statistics page for details on cases and deaths from the virus. For this study, the process-tracing approach frequently used by historical sociology is appropriate. Process-tracing sifts through the complexity of a certain socio-historical time horizon to analyse key data points over time, helping to test or generate new ideas, hypothesis, and theories. I am especially interested in understanding moments of contingent choice that, upon selecting certain (in)actions over other, may have exerted path-dependent of path-shaping structuration on the future choices of the involved actors (Mahoney, 2000; see also George & Bennett, 2005; Mahoney & Schensul, 2006). One way we to understand the significance of contingent actions and path-dependent outcomes – itself generally retroactively discovered, in tandem with the usage of social theory – is to follow Mahoney’s (2000, pp. 507–508) argument when he says:

I locate contingent choices that had significant effect on future events of COVID-19 crisis management in the US that, despite being embedded within preexisting structures and tendencies, cannot be explained by them in toto. This is why it is imperative to analytically map how the structural imperatives of capitalism are modulated by how the political power is exerted in the context of the US polity, and also lends itself to comparative analysis of other States’ responses to the coronavirus crisis. Rather than embracing a deterministic form of path-dependency that allegedly ‘locks-in’ a determined path (see Mahoney & Schensul, 2006), I recognise a more dynamic possibility. This locates the dialectic of path-dependent and path-shaping possibilities that exist within a sequence, where modulation-of or total rupture-with the path can occur, if key social actors adequately read the conjuctural opportunities, intervene, and shifting the balance of political power (Jessop, 2001; see also George & Bennett, 2005, pp. 212–213; Mahoney, 2000).

Although process-tracing is often used to examine longer-term analyses – identifying key ruptures in the fabric of society that act as mechanisms of social change – I bring the level of analysis to a shorter-term framework. The best way to conduct a case study of short-to-medium term social change that is attuned to chance, contingency, and iterative analysis of theory and data is one of analytical abduction. An abductive approach explores data and its connection to existing theoretical expectations in a relation way and takes into account the preexisting intellectual expectations of the researcher as well. This recursive process is fruitful for sociologists documenting how real-time data analysis filters through our socio-theoretical expectations, and may lead to theory building, refinement, and extension, as we conduct our case analyses (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). To help illustrate the dynamic nature of studying and living through the first several months of COVID crisis management in the US, my analysis of the emergent crisis is written in an iterative fashion to maximise the readers’ ability to understand processes of crisis-learning. Simply put, this article recurrently moves back-and-forth between data, theory, and analysis, to produce a dynamic understanding of meaning-making and political economy as they intermixed in real-time. I conclude with a discussion on numerous areas of research to which this paper makes a substantive contribution, and with which it may enter future dialogue for COVID-19 research and beyond.

The cultural political economy approach was developed to understand the evolutionary relationship between the material and discursive moments of social action over time. Since the earliest days of its inception approximately two decades ago it grew into a robust paradigm, and is the outcome of an historically transdisciplinary research agenda borrowing ideas from critical state theory, political economy/geography, and critical discourse analysis (see, inter alia, González, Oosterlynck, Ribera-Fumaz, & Rossi, 2018; Inverardi-Ferri, 2021; Jessop, 2010, 2015a; Jessop & Oosterlynck, 2008; Jessop & Sum, 2001, 2006; Jessop, Labrousse, Lamarche, & Vercueil, 2012; Mueller & Schmidt, 2020; Oosterlynck & González, 2013; Schmidt & Mueller, 2020).

The CPE approach’s unique emphasis on evolutionary mechanisms of social change offers a framework for intellectual entry-points to examine the variation, selection, retention, and reinforcement/consolidation of discursive and material practices and policies. It is especially well-suited to be used for understanding crisis construal, management, and learning. Here, scholars can trace the cross-cutting and evolving relationships between numerous pertinent actors over time, observing how/when/if they alter their actions in relation to the broader web of activity in which they are immersed (Jessop, 2015a, 2015b, 2018; Jessop & Oosterlynck, 2008; Oosterlynck & González, 2013).

Based on readings of key CPE scholarship (Jessop, 2004, 2010, 2018; Jessop & Oosterlynck, 2008), its approach can briefly be summarised in the following way: At the beginning of a period when actors are engaging in complexity reduction and making sense of a situation, there are a variety ways to construe the situation. Not all construals of social reality hold equal weight. The selection of certain frameworks for addressing politics and society will depend on the prevailing global-to-local conjunctural ideologies, discourses, political-institutional arrangements, economic arrangements, media operations, and other issues that have inscribed selectivities favouring certain paths of action over others. The retention of a selected behaviour is dependent on structural and agency-based determinants, including: whether other intellectuals favour the actions; how it is appraised and circulated in the broader web of social media outlets; how it meshes with the medium and long-term needs of capital and dominant political blocs; and how ‘the masses’ (dis)agree with the appraisal and political response to the situation. Long-term favourable appraisals of certain material and discursive responses to crises by powerful political-economic actors; sustained positive appraisal in key made and/or pop-cultural outlets; enactments in key civil society or business organisation behaviours; and incorporation into the built-environment all increase the chances for sustained reinforcement and consolidation.

Several specific elements of the CPE approach help make sense of governance and learning (with)in crises, making it exceptionally well suited to understand the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. The immediacy of experiencing first-hand – or witnessing through the mass media – is covered by the concept of learning in crisis (Jessop, 2015a, 2015b, 2018). Given that this is the metaphorical ‘slap in the face’ of lived-experience for many, there will likely be a wide range of ways one might try initially making sense of the situation. This represents a tangible, subjective portion of the crisis that can lead to alternative construals of a crisis scenario. While crises have their emergent discursive and subjectively indeterminate elements, they also have their objectively overdetermined moments. Here, ‘a set of social relations (including their links to the natural world) cannot be reproduced in the usual ways’ (Jessop, 2015a, p. 97) while preexisting political-economic and ideological factors act as structuring-principles that create initial parameters in which crisis-induced social action unfolds.

This relationship between objective overdetermination and subjective indeterminacy gives us a chance to examine learning about crises, as they unfold. While learning about crisis, certain discursive and political strategies may be tried-out by a variety of actors, perhaps proving to be completely inadequate or inappropriate for the evolving crisis – even if similar techniques were used to ameliorate prior crises. The co-evolutionary relationship of the material and discursive moment here are both critical, as ‘it involves not only interpretive power but also the capacity to translate construals into authoritative action’ (Jessop, 2015a, p. 102; see also Jessop, 2015b, 2018). Thus, not only are active interventions on an issue noteworthy, but non-interventions and decisions not to act on an issue are useful to understand as well.

Whether old mechanisms of crisis management are discussed and tried or new approaches emerge is partially contingent on how ‘correctly’ one initially reads a crisis. Correctness of a construal may be haphazard, perhaps attributable to nothing other than a social actor quickly and proactively trying ‘to impose [an] agreed reading … creat[ing] its own ‘truth-effects’ [that] may then be retained through its capacity to shape reality’ (Jessop, 2015b, p. 255). To offer a comprehensive analysis of this process we should examine the potential for a crisis discourse to be taken seriously by gauging its scientific validity (i.e. how it ‘conform[s] with prevailing scientific procedures and rules of evaluation’), narrative plausibility (i.e. how it syncs with ‘the prevailing discourses in circulation among relevant social forces’) and pragmatic correctness (i.e, if the social actor can successfully ‘read a conjuncture, discern potential futures, provide a plausible narrative, and [subsequently] guide action’) (Jessop, 2018, p. 58; see also Lecercle, 2006). Later, after a crisis is discursively and/or materially considered to be over, the opportunity for learning from crisis occurs. The opportunity for gaining insights on successes and failures of governance during the crisis is possible but not guaranteed and also dependent on a wide range of other medium-to-long-term factors.

Having outlined the relevant portions of CPE and crisis learning above, its value-added for making sense of the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic is clear. In addition, CPE’s robust engagement with capitalism and its dynamic interplay with socio-cultural, political, and ideological phenomenon give it analytical leverage over ‘softer’ constructivist approaches which may offer social scientists less ability to engage with macro-level questions of political economy (Jessop & Oosterlynck, 2008; Mueller & Schmidt, 2020; see also Arrighi, 2001). With that said, its affinity for commixing analyses of discourse and meaning-making, states and structural power, and political crises allow for new fruitful dialog with numerous approaches to such topics, and is well-suited to expand the growing domain of politico-cultural sociology that tackles these very questions (see Blokker, Eranti, & Vieten, 2020; De Blasia & Selva, 2021; Zoeller & Bandelj, 2019).

On 21 January 2020, the Washington State Department of Health and the CDC reported the first case of COVID-19 in the United States (Washington State Department of Health, 2020) One day later Donald Trump offered his first appraisal of the virus to the public when asked by a reporter is he was worried about a possible pandemic, to which he replied ‘No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control’ (cited in Leonhardt, 2020). On January 29, Trump established the Coronavirus Task Force and within 48 h proclaimed COVID-19 a public health emergency, drafting policies to prohibit entry to the country for foreign nationals who recently visited China but had no relation to US citizens or permanent residents (Edwards, 2020; Glenza, 2020; The United States Office of the Press Secretary, 2020). Yet, on January 30, Trump told an audience ‘We have it very well under control’ (cited in Leonhardt, 2020).

These actions represent some of Tump’s earliest public moment of crisis construal, how it was conveyed to the broader population, and how he might go about handling the emergence and spread of this virus. Although these actions generally considered to be the earliest political responses to COVID-19 by Trump, several (in)actions and chance occurrences weeks earlier also had path-shaping potential for how this emergent crisis would unfold.

On January 3, 2020 US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar learned of the virus and its early impact on China, based on the dialogue the WHO had with Chinese health officials several days earlier. Azar allegedly could not reach Trump to discuss the issue until January 18, at which point Trump seemed somewhat uninterested – preferring to discuss the vaping product market (Harris, Miller, Dawsey, & Nakashima, 2020). On January 29, a memo written by Trump’s top Trade Advisor, Peter Navarro, was allegedly circulated widely among those willing to listen within The White House. Navarro’s memo outlined the need to take substantial efforts to prevent widespread damage to US public health and the economy, and he suggested immediate travel bans from China (Haberman, 2020). In his memo, Navarro allegedly stated: ‘The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil …. This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans’ (cited in Haberman, 2020). President Trump denied ever seeing this memo, and a second dire sounding memo released by Navarro on February 23, despite Navarro’s role as Trump’s top trade advisor who was eventually appointed to coordinate the Defense Production Act initiative to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic in March (Chalfant & Lane, 2020; Haberman, 2020; Oprysko, 2020).

It is also reported that numerous branches of the US national security and intelligence apparatus’ were closely monitoring the unfolding COVID-19 crisis in China during the months of January and February, characterising COVID-19 as having ‘the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it’ (Beggin, 2020; Harris et al., 2020). It is also reported that, ‘by early February, much of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA’s intelligence reports were dedicated to warnings about Covid-19’ (Beggin, 2020). Lastly, in early February Trump admitted to noted US journalist Bob Woodward that COVID-19 was more deadly than he was telling the public, calling it a ‘very tricky’ and ‘very delicate one,’ which was ‘more deadly than even your strenuous flus’ (cited in Gangel, Herb, & Stuart, 2020). The next month Trump also told Woodward that he intentionally downplayed the severity of COVID-19 to the public, but Woodward chose not to inform the public of any of these exchanges until September 2020 (Gangel et al., 2020).

Notwithstanding the occasional sign that COVID-19 might be an issue on which Trump would take major political action (e.g. travel restrictions he placed to prevent potential cases of COVID-19 coming to the US from China, and eventually most of Europe [see Orr, 2020]),¹ he discursively downplayed the potential severity of COVID-19 through February. In his interview conducted with Woodward on February seventh – not made public until 9 September 2020 – Trump told him he was well aware of the severity and deadliness of the virus (Gangel et al., 2020). Yet, on February tenth he wishfully appraised the outlook for COVID-19’s decline, proclaiming ‘Now the virus that we’re talking about, a lot of people think that goes away in April, with the heat’ (cited in Abadi, Baylon, & Lindsay, 2020). On February 25, Dr. Nancy Messonnier – director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases – sounded an alarm and announced that community spread of COVID-19 in the US was close to guaranteed, and it was now only ‘a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness’ (cited in McLaughlin & Almasy, 2020). The very next day, Trump tweeted the following remark to his social media followers:

Two days later (February 28), he stated that ‘the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,’ following with a chronological outline that first Democrats tried the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ angle, then ‘tried the impeachment hoax,’ with coronavirus as ‘their new hoax’ to be weaponized against his presidential agenda (cited in Egan, 2020). The next day he also declared ‘our country is prepared for any circumstance. We hope it’s not going to be a major circumstance; it’ll be a smaller circumstance. But whatever the circumstance is, we’re prepared’ (The White House, 2020a).

The data outlined above illustrate Trump’s discursive construal of the emergent COVID-19 crisis and his ability to offer a somewhat pragmatically correct reading of the crisis early on. That is to say, Trump articulated a message that established a connection between preexisting distrusts of those critical of his Presidential policies in the years prior and his emergent crisis handling agenda for COVID-19. To be clear, I am not suggesting he thinks the actual virus is a hoax (i.e. is not really infecting and killing people), but rather that he discursively situates his position as a President under siege by deceptive Democrats who are ‘out to get him’ in a time of crisis. This helps create ‘truth effects’ independent of the scientific realities of the virus’ spread.

This emergent crisis construal of ‘downplay the severity’ was selected and retained by popular right-wing media voices throughout February and March. Widely listened to right-wing radio and cable television commentators used their platforms to shape the public’s perception of COVID-19 in a way that generally included varieties of threat denialism, extreme suspicion of scientific discourse on the potential severity of COVID-19, and allusions to the virus being used as a politico-rhetorical weapon by liberals to harm President Trump’s political agenda (Blake, 2020; Grossman, 2020; MacLeod, 2020; Peters, 2020; B. Smith, 2020). In juxtaposition to Trump and allied media-sources downplaying of COVID-19’s severity throughout January and February, the consensus within scientific and public health communities on its severity was established throughout this period – if he were willing to listen, or the public were given a greater chance to hear (Cole, 2020; E. Edwards, 2020; Pilkington, 2020).

The delay in heeding the scientific concern over the situation lead to other critical delays, in a situation where slow or chaotic crisis learning over the course of just one or two weeks can drastically change the scope of the outbreak. A lag in attempts to begin testing for the virus which was exacerbated by the CDC producing a batch of flawed tests to distribute in February (Grady, 2020). A delay in testing kept states and their citizens unaware of how rapidly the virus may already be spreading, creating a scenario going into mid-March where there the US was lagging behind many other countries in their availability of tests for the public (Buchanan, Lai, & McCann, 2020; Fink & Baker, 2020).

Initial appraisals of skepticism and downplaying in key media outlets wide widespread popular reach, coupled with the President’s contradictory periodic claims of COVID-19 being a minor and easily controllable inconvenience created a discursive space early on that was reinforced by the material reality that the confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US were relatively small until early-to-mid March (Worldometer, 2020a). In fact, the non-presence of confirmed cases in January going into February was at least partially acknowledged by Trump later on – to be discussed shortly – as to why he was hesitant to ‘shut down the US economy’ so early on. Since Trump’s initial construal of the crisis was deemed narratively plausible and was at least partially able to construct a pragmatically correct discourse – particularly for those with rightward-leaning politics – it created a partial ‘truth effect’ that shaped popular interpretation of reality for COVID-19 in ways different from those with non-affiliated and leftward-leaning politics.

A nationwide poll conducted by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist on January 31–February 1 showed that while 44% of respondents were ‘very concerned’ or ‘concerned’ about the potential for ‘the spread of coronavirus to your community’, 55% of respondents were ‘not very concerned’ or ‘not concerned at all’ (Aubrey, 2020; Marist, 2020). A nationwide survey conducted by Gallop between February 3–16 also revealed that only 36% of respondents were worried that they or a family member ‘will be exposed to coronavirus’ (Newport, 2020). Within this poll, 44% of self-identified Independents were ‘very/somewhat worried,’ while 30% and 26% of self-identified Republicans and Democrats, respectively, were ‘very/somewhat worried.’ (McCarthy, 2020). When Gallop conducted a follow-up poll approximately one month later these numbers shifted, with important implications for the potential discursive impact that Trump and allied conservative media sources had while downplaying the severity of COVID-19 over the prior month. Only a minority of self-identified Republicans were still ‘very/somewhat worried’ – coming in at 42% – yet the response for other respondents shifted to 73% and 64% of self-identified Democrats and Independents, respectively, being ‘very/somewhat worried’ (McCarthy, 2020).

Altogether, the following can be observed: Donald Trump contingently selected a crisis construal that articulated a situation to the general public that things may ‘return to normal’ soon, creating a loosely path-dependent sequence of events. Trump’s downplaying the severity of the offered a narratively plausible reading of the scenario, as he tapped into preexisting distrust of those critical of his performance, getting his message selected and retained by key media outlets throughout February. Additionally, the national platform given to Trump is unmatched by those with contradictory appraisals coming from the scientific community or elsewhere. A key element of narrative plausibility is the ability to selectively pick fact that fit their proffered narrative, while filtering out those that prove to problematic (Jessop, 2018, p. 59). The President has a captive national audience with whom he can conduct direct interaction via daily press conferences, while also receiving frequent invitations for interviews on television, radio, and other media outlets.

Trump also possessed broad ‘interpretive power’ and, to a general extent, ‘interpretive authority’ to impact crisis management (Jessop, 2018, pp. 60–61). The former allotted Trump the capacity to construe, articulate, and guide in the crafting of ameliorative policies. The latter involves the privilege to interpreting the legality-of and implement large-scale policies including in ‘exceptional’ or crisis circumstances. Trump’s potential to implement emergency protocols through the mobilisation of military and other actors was clearly a part of Trump’s crisis management and is related to his later framing of himself as a ‘wartime president’ – discussed in the next sub-section. Overall, this early crisis discourse was directed towards shoring up political support among the electorate, and did achieve a degree of narrative plausibility.

The scientific validity of Trump’s handling of the crisis must be clarified. Trump downplayed the threat of the severity of COVID-19, which was reinforced by key media outlets while providing a false sense of security to the general public. To some in the public, this scientific evaluation of how to handle the crisis, and how serious it truly was, was compounded by other material factors, such as the widespread unavailability of access to COVID-19 tests. Since citizens of a polity are forced to rely upon elected officials to make the best decisions regarding the promotion of the health and well-being of the population, early reassurances by Trump that things will soon be better, coupled with the visibility of the White House Coronavirus Task Force gave an illusion of scientific validity and correctness of his response to the general public. The Task Force was ostensibly organised around numerous figures in the fields of public health and medicine, and gave a veneer of a coherent and organised scientific response. Lastly, given the fact that the earliest days of the crisis was an intense process of crisis learning for scientists and doctors themselves, the Trump administrations scientific handling of the moment was likely to be given some slack by portions of the public, for reasons related to the pragmatic and narrative domains of his crisis management, discussed earlier, and henceforth.

Following the CPE framework, President Trump’s crisis management and planning for the future of America can analytically be described as partially pragmatically correct in the early days. He read the prevailing politico-discursive coordinates of the US polity – of which he is an active participant and influencer – and offered a vision of soon-to-be reopened and flourishing of the country that could ‘make the country great again’ (after the pandemic ended, and building from his general campaign sloganeering). He thus intervened in the capacity that he could to offer a plausible future that US citizens vaguely wanted to hear (i.e. that the country would soon ‘re-open’ and be ‘back to normal’). Plus, given the structural imperative to reproduce capitalist social relations in the US, it was ‘pragmatic’ for Trump to articulate a vision of a flourishing capitalist America in the months ahead, especially since he had the political power/capacity to attempt bringing this future to fruition, as the President.

Early on, Trump’s entire act of crisis construal and management was deemed plausible by many Americans due to the reality that, from January through February, confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US were miniscule, scientists demanding stringent public health protocols were not always incorporated into the dominant political narrative, and key elements of the media ecology reinforced his prescriptions. Based on key tenets of path-dependency, the causal argument outlined above also illustrates that the causal processes unfolding over time were ‘highly sensitive to events that [took] place in the early stages of [the] overall historical sequence’ (Mahoney, 2000, p. 510). Second, the ‘early historical events are contingent occurrences that [could not] be explained on the basis of prior events’ (p. 511). Again, the early [structurally objective] conditions organised the background of the opportunities for (in)action, but there were no strict determining factors that ‘made’ Trump opt articulate a ‘downplay-the-threat’ discourse to the public for X instead of Y number of days. As such, this sub-section illustrated the key early moments of subjective indeterminacy that actors engage in while reading and responding to an emergent crisis scenario.

As the CPE approach to crisis analysis highlights, ‘crises are moments of profound cognitive and strategic disorientation. They disorient inherited expectations and practices [and] challenge past lessons and ways of learning’ (Jessop, 2015b, p. 255). This means that the pragmatic correctness and narrative plausibility of Trump’s crisis construal and management may change or be challenged if conflicting discourses start being taken more seriously, or the materiality of the situation at hand shifts in such a way that the prior crisis diagnosis is no longer deemed ‘correct’ by a growing portion of the population. In other words, there is always a possibility that a new critical juncture or opportunity will emerge where hitherto path-dependent actions can be drastically altered, creating new material and discursive parameters in which social action transpires.

By mid-March such an opportunity emerged, offering people a chance to re-read existing crisis construals and question their scientific validity, as many Americans were now enmeshed in their own form of crisis learning. The scientific validity of Trump’s crisis construal and management was seriously challenged throughout March, as the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases in the US skyrocketed from 75 (March 1) → 5,350 (March 15) → 211,316 (March 31) (Worldometer, 2020a).³ Thus, the discussions of COVID-19 being a minor outbreak that would hopefully be vanquished by April was no longer tenable. Not only did it appear scientifically incorrect, but it was now a heavily damaged discursive technique due to the clear material impacts that such a sudden spike in sickness causes.

Beyond the precipitous increase in physically ill individuals, there was a colossal increase in unemployment – partially due to the increased demands that they stay-at-home, partially due to an increase in people being sick, or fearing sickness if they went out – and the US stock market experienced spasmodic downward spirals over the course of several weeks. In the second and third weeks of March 2020 some 6+ million Americans file for unemployment insurance, the largest short-term spike in unemployment claims in the history of the United States (Long & Fowers, 2020; United States Department of Labor, 2020). In the closing week of February the stock market began to dip precipitously, and during the second week of March the Down Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 had their largest single-day drops since 1987 (Imbert & Franck, 2020; Imbert & Huang, 2020). On March 13 Trump said ‘I am officially declaring a national emergency – two very big words’, which unlocked billions worth of federal funding that could be dispersed to states and cities in need (cited in Samuels & Chalfant, 2020).

This juncture created space for new social imaginaries to circulate, and many political officials began new rounds of crisis learning-cum-management. Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike were proposing monthly checks to all Americans, similar to a short-term universal basic income (see Baird, 2020; Ocasio-Cortez [@AOC], 2020). This policy discourse was fresh in the minds of many Americans, thanks to the robust national discussion that emerged on this topic over the prior year, courtesy of former 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang (Yang, 2020). Certainly, there was variation within these policy discourses on the details of what such a plan should look like. However, issues that were previously marginal were elevated over the prior year, given new life during this moment of crisis, and offered a glimpse into new attempts to offer a different ‘pragmatic’ reading of the crisis.

By this point, Trump was also engaging in his own re-calibration of crisis management. After declaring the national state of emergency on March 13, he and the Coronavirus Task Force followed up on March 16 with a sobering press conference and released a ‘15 days to slow the spread’ document urging all Americans to take measures to stem the spread of COVID-19 (Mcgraw, Orr, & Kumar, 2020; The White House, 2020b, 2020c). Shortly thereafter Trump began discursively positioning himself as a ‘wartime president’ (see D. Smith, 2020). From March 25–27 the US Congress and Senate worked on a stimulus bill that was eventually signed by Trump, a one-time, $1,200 stimulus check to most American citizens (Pramuk, 2020). In the week immediately following this new discussion for another round of checks to be provided to Americans in the future, with Trump stating on April 5 that he ‘like[d] money going directly to people’ and ‘like[d] the concept of’ another round of stimulus checks going out to Americans (The White House, 2020g).

As March came to an end, the scientific validity of Trump’s earlier claims regarding COVID-19 potentially ‘going away’ by April was further discredited, and on March 29 the Trump administration extended their recommendation for social/physical distancing through the month of April (Echavarri, 2020). The potential narrative plausibility and pragmatic correctness of these claims were further reduced as Democrats and Republican officials across more states and cities began implementing stay-at-home orders, and more people acknowledged that major changes were coming to their daily routines as March came to an end (Reuters/Ipsos, 2020; Roberts, 2020). After some time, Trump proved he was attuned to the discordance between his wishful appraisals of the crisis from January through part of March and the material severity of the circumstances as March came to an end. Accordingly, in April he began adjusting his discursive practice from downplaying the severity to one of ‘it could have been worse.’ On April 13, Trump suggested his ‘early’ actions helped to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and when he was presented with an estimate of 1.6–2.2 million COVID-19 related deaths in a worst-case scenario, he said his response was to demand it be lowered:

He made very similar remarks during the following days’ press conference (The White House, 2020j), showing an ability to read the current political circumstances and begin working towards constructing a more plausible reading of the crisis. Altogether, this juncture provided congress, the President, and the American public new space to reconsider preexisting crisis narratives and policies, shed older construals now deemed inadequate or inappropriate, and consider new directions for crisis management. As Lecercle (2006, p. 103) articulates, ‘a concrete analysis of a concrete situation consists in deciding that yesterday’s slogan is no longer valid today.’ For Trump, this meant maintaining some semblance of dedication to immediately ‘reopening’ the economy, while also identifying that his prior appraisal of COVID-19 in the country was no longer satisfactory for appearances or reality. His ability to impose a new pragmatic ‘truth’ regarding COVID-19 and its impact on politics would be determined in the months ahead, and would continue being disputed by other political visions.

Why might Donald Trump have routinely downplayed the severity of the emergent COVID-19 crisis? Pilkington (2020) offered a perceptive initial appraisal when he says that Trump ‘downplay[ed] the severity of the threat’ situation for two months while ‘ke[eping] up a relentlessly upbeat façade,’ all ‘for the benefit of the New York stock exchange.’ The demands of a capitalist world economy undeniably leave fingerprints across the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. This sub-section further illustrates the structural and conjunctural political-economic circumstances that overdetermined the crisis response.

Besides the objectively scientific determinants of how the virus spreads, the overdetermining political, economic, and ideological conditions are none other than the broad pillars of the neoliberal capitalist world marketplace, in which the US is a leading actor. In the neoliberal conjuncture – or, the era of capitalist realism – the power of private markets is celebrated as social safety nets are stripped away, and talks of transitioning beyond our current mode of economic planning nearly unthinkable (Fisher, 2009; Harvey, 2016; Pugh, 2015; see also Mueller & McCollum, 2021). Additionally, the spatio-temporality and geographic structure of global production networks changed significantly during the neoliberal era, where just-in-time manufacturing, flexible labour, and lean production and distribution becoming increasingly popular methods for businesses to cut costs and manage production worldwide (Dicken, 2011; Walleigh, 1986).

Understanding these tendencies of the late-20th to early twenty-first-century political-economy is imperative, as they set the backdrop into which COVID-19 was birthed. These discursive and material practices structure not only the range of what is considered desirable or plausible, but how nations can deal with crises at the time of their emergence. Thus, the capitalist/market-oriented discursive articulation offered by Trump and colleagues is a stand-in for the overdetermined nature of the crisis in general. This was clearly illustrated with the late-February occurrence of a CDC affiliate telling the population of the US to prepare for community spread of COVID-19, while Trump allegedly ‘complained that [the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Nancy] Messonnier was scaring the stock markets’ (Harris et al., 2020). It was highlighted every time member of The White House Coronavirus Task Force spoke of ‘unleashing the power of the private sector’ (cited in Jones, 2020) while welding ‘the full force of the federal government with the full power of private enterprise’ to deal with this public health crisis (The White House, 2020e; see also The White House, 2020f). This was paired with President Trump’s frequent claims that ‘America will again, and soon, be open for business,’ and desires to ‘open up our country as soon as possible,’ despite scientific evidence suggesting an alternative path of action (see The White House, 2020d, 2020g).

These ‘market imperatives’ pervaded all elements of the crisis response and management, beyond the initial discursive construal. It is the underlying logic structuring the specific impact of COVID-19 on the US medical and healthcare system. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the United States had one of the poorest performing healthcare systems among Western capitalist states (Schneider, Sarnak, Squires, Shah, & Doty, 2017), and its ‘fractured health system … made it more vulnerable to coronavirus’ (Scott, 2020). In addition, Dr. Nicholas Hill, chief of pulmonary and critical care at Tufts University School of Medicine, points out that the lack of ‘slack’ in healthcare system may exacerbate COVID-19 related issues, while ‘Hospitals lose money unless they keep their beds full and they turn them over as quickly as they can’ in the United States (cited in Brueck, 2020). The structure of global production and supply networks are vital to note when considering ease of availability to much-needed medical equipment during a pandemic. As more nations were impacted by COVID-19 global supply chains were fractured and slowed, due to labour stoppages and travel restrictions, and ‘the coronavirus exposes[d] the fragility of an economy built on outsourcing and just-in-time inventory’ (O’Leary, 2020). These precarious global chains frustrated attempted acquisitions of vital medical supplies and personal protective equipment [PPE] to provide to frontline workers and those in need, potentially leaving many people in need of goods that may show up too late. Thus, the non-decision of Donald Trump to offer clear and comprehensive federal directives to states in late January or early February on the necessity to implement social distancing measures to minimise community spread of the virus would impact the US’ healthcare system in several ways.

Early action to prevent exposure-to and spread-of COVID-19 would have contributed towards ‘flattening the curve’, where reducing the number of active cases also impacts the pressures faced by myriad COVID-impacted sectors (e.g. healthcare, schools, vaccine manufacturers) (see Roberts, 2020). Regarding Trump’s decision to wait until March 16 to offer the ‘15 days to slow the spread’ social distancing guidelines, epidemiological research suggested that:

If these types of measures are not taken early on, then an already fragile healthcare system is not only overwhelmed with patients, but the already limited supply of medical devices and PPE becomes stretched to untenable lengths. At this point, local officials and hospitals will notice a rapid uptick in hospital visits by sick individuals, and an immediate need for crisis learning emerges. In the US, many hospitals and medical workers had to develop ‘contingency strategies’ to deal with recurrent scenarios of running low on PPE (CDC, 2020). These contingency strategies often involved asking hospital staff ‘to reuse their equipment, clean it with unproven methods, and use substandard materials – including trash bags – in the absence of adequate supplies’, compromising the safety of doctors, nurses, custodial workers, and patients alike (Parshley, 2020).

To be clear, I am not suggesting it is solely Trump’s fault for the ravages of COVID-19 in the United States. However, the contingent choices made by Trump early on had a path-shaping impact on how it unfolded and exacerbated many of the structural and conjuctural issues already present within the US’ underwhelming healthcare/medical system, and the neoliberal political economy at large. Earlier action to start ‘shutting down’ the US was certainly a realistic choice that Trump could have made – but chose not to. Thus, keeping the US economy ‘open’ through February, while contemplating the need to ‘reopen’ as soon as ameliorative measures were being implemented illustrates how strongly the political-economic ‘market imperative’ overdetermined the crisis. On April 13, President Trump offered the following rhetorical question when queried by reporters on why he did not take earlier action to ‘close down’ the US and demand robust measures to stem the spread of COVID-19:

President Trump followed up shortly thereafter with a claim that the timing of his earlier crisis management actions ‘was very good,’ while admiring the stock market for being ‘at this tremendously high number.’ (The White House, 2020i). On April 16 The White House released a plan for ‘opening up America again,’ giving state-level officials the ability to resume normal business activity in the near future so long as they ideally complied with a 3-phase process of medical preparedness to help prevent new outbreaks of COVID-19 (see The White House, 2020k). These were guidelines for state and local officials to hopefully follow, not federally enforceable orders, giving the Trump administration ‘political cover if not everything goes well’ (Mason & Holland, 2020). Thus, the federalist and de-centralised response to COVID-19 in the US raised the important question of whom to hold responsible for the shortcomings (or successes) of certain crisis management policies (Selin, 2020).

Altogether, this sub-section illustrates the overdetermining role of the capitalist ‘market imperative’ on crisis management strategies, and its lethal impact on the already lackluster US healthcare system. With that said, Trump’s ability to construct a ‘pragmatically correct’ reading was not a long-term success, despite his desire to control the narrative-on and agenda-for crisis management, hoping it would create the conditions for a long-term mandate for market-mediated pandemic management – to the detriment of public health. Satisfying the demands of certain sectors of capital may secure short-term stability and hegemony but is unlikely to garner long-term strategic support among the masses, especially as friends and family perish, in part due to select crisis management policies. Thus, some may consider the crisis as a ‘public health crisis,’ different sectors of society construe it as a ‘crisis of scientific legitimacy,’ ‘crisis of Presidential decision making,’ ‘crisis of dishonest media coverage,’ ‘crisis of capitalism,’ and myriad other phenomena. Future research on the long-term impact of the Trump administration’s policies to ‘reopen America’ are surely in order and can reveal more on the multi-step processes of learning in crises, and learning about crises (see Jessop, 2018).

This article offered a data-based and theoretically-guided appraisal of the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it unfolded in the United States. Using the cultural political economy approach to crisis learning and management, it located key mechanisms and junctures that had major impacts on how people understood and responded to the crisis. Early and contingent choices made by President Trump to downplay the potential severity of COVID-19 to public audiences, while selectively opting to listen to or heed advice from scientists and officials warning him to do otherwise had major, path-shaping effects on the subsequent crisis scenario. As a partial outcome to this, the already-fragile and inefficient US healthcare system was stretched to unsustainable lengths. These crisis acts were profoundly structured by ideological and material factors that predated the pandemic but did not completely determine the actions of the President. In other words, emergent crises always have moments of subjective openness, where contingent actions can have dynamic, path-altering impacts on the future trajectory of the scenario.

The COVID-19 crisis is a multifaceted, with the potential to drastically reshape the fabric of the world system. As such, the future research agenda on this issue is wide open. Early research on COVID-19 in the US shows its role in exacerbating preexisting inequalities, while also being impacted by country-specific initial conditions that favoured individualised and non-federally coordinated responses and (in)actions (Bian, Li, Xu, & Foutz, forthcoming; Calarco, Meanwell, Anderson, & Knopf, 2021; Gordon, Huberfeld, & Jones, 2020; Pirtle, 2020; Stuart, Petersen, & Gunderson, 2021; Wrigley-Field, Garcia, Leider, Robertson, & Wurtz, 2020). These issues can be further considered with a critical state-theoretical approach developed by Jessop (1997, 2016), allowing us to see how the ongoing tendencies towards denationalisation of statehood (i.e. shifting of previously nationally-handled policies to sub-national scales), and destatization of politics/polity (i.e. where the State [un]officially practices co-governance with private sector and non-governmental organisation to manage the demands of twenty-first-century capitalism) impacted COVID-19 crisis management in the US.

Beyond the US case, exploring global issues of ‘vaccine nationalism,’ rising xenophobia, gender-based violence, the climate crisis, and their relationship to the ongoing crisis of COVID-capitalism demand further attention (Dlamini, 2021; Robinson, 2020; Zhou, 2021; Zinn, 2021). In the era of neoliberal austerity, scholars should pay close attention to how mutual aid and solidarity groups augment or replace government-based ameliorative policies. This will improve our understanding of how non-state organisations conceive of their role in disaster management and social reproduction, and whether they are acting to challenge or supplement the capitalist state (see Illner, 2021).

When a social system is suddenly destabilised it creates opportunity for large-scale, long term, and path-shaping social change that upends what was previously considered impossible (Wallerstein, 2011). If the COVID-19 global pandemic becomes a major, change-inducing event for many around the world, what will unfold is not just a series of patchwork policies and muddled actions to temporarily stabilise social systems in the months ahead. It would create the opportunity for citizens across the world to cultivate an ethic towards expanding the current horizons of our political imaginaries, striving towards an altogether different social system that is not just considered possible, but necessary to establish in a post-COVID-19 world. Given the current state of political cynicism, burnout, and mass anxiety that pervades the era of capitalist realism, the need for reinvigorated political strategising to transition to a new and more equitable social system seems urgent (Fisher, 2009; Han, 2015; Mueller, 2021; Mueller & McCollum, 2021; Mueller, McCollum, & Schmidt, 2020; Žižek, 2020). As Diserholt (2021) observes, ‘there is thus a presence of helplessness in the air: that no matter how much one tries, Covid is here to stay.’ Thus, we may be witnessing something akin to an ideology of COVID-capitalist realism – the belief that there is no alternative to austerity-induced crisis management that prioritises profits over human life, against the backdrop of a never-ending pandemic. Time, political intervention, and collective action will determine the trajectory of the post-COVID-19 landscape. The CPE approach provides concepts to guide our interventions on these important issues.

The author would like to thank Steven Schmidt for offering encouragement and feedback on a very early version of this manuscript. The author would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers, who offered challenging and constructive feedback.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).