Chapter 3
President Donald Trump’s Image Repair
on Fox News Sunday, Axios,
and ABC News Town Hall
Introduction
President Donald Trump’s handling of COVID-19 threatened his reelec-
tion campaign. The pandemic was first reported in the United States in
January of 2020; the first deaths occurred in February. By June 24, 2020,
the United States had the highest number of infections (over four million)
and deaths (over 140,000) in the world (“COVID-19 Pandemic,” 2020).
President Trump’s approval rating fell to 38 percent in mid-2020 (“Trump
Job Approval” 2020), and Vice President Biden led President Trump in
national polls on the 2020 presidential campaign, 51 percent to 40 per-
cent (Restuccia 2020); Biden also led in six key swing states at the time
(Pramuk 2020). The pandemic imperiled the president’s reelection bid.
Trump gave interviews to Chris Wallace on his show Fox News Sunday
on July 19, 2020, to Jonathan Swan of Axios on August 3, 2020, and in an
ABC News town hall hosted by George Stephanopoulos on September 15,
2020. Image Repair Theory (Benoit 1995, 2015) has been utilized frequently
in prior scholarship (see Ha and Boynton 2014). This essay considers Trump’s
discourse using this approach and then evaluates this defense.
Analysis of President Donald Trump’s Televised
Image Repair Interviews
Trump gave three televised interviews that addressed his handling of the
COVID-19 pandemic before the November 3, 2020, presidential elec-
43
44 | Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies
tion, one each in July (with Chris Wallace on Fox; see “President Trump
Defends” 2020), August (with Jonathan Swan on Axios; see “President
Trump Interview” 2020), and September (with George Stephanopolous
on ABC; see ABC News 2020). Each text will be analyzed in turn in this
section. Although each interview encompassed several topics, this analysis
will focus on the coronavirus pandemic.
Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace: July 19, 2020
In his interview with Trump, Wallace pointed to the recent rise in COVID-
19 cases: “Since June it has gone up more than double. One day this week
75,000 new cases” (all quotations from this interview are from “President
Trump Defends” 2020). This statement made the attack on President Trump
plain; he deployed seven image repair strategies in this conversation: denial,
straw argument, deflect attention, bolstering, minimization, differentiation,
and corrective action (more is not necessarily better).
Denial. Wallace declared, “Sir, we have the seventh highest mortality
rate in the world. Our mortality rate is higher than Brazil, it’s higher than
Russia, and the European Union has us on a travel ban.” The President
denied this accusation: “When you talk about mortality risks, I think it’s
the opposite. I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the
world. . . . I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest mor-
tality rate anywhere in the world. . . . I heard we had the best mortality
rate. . . . Number one low mortality fatality rates.” President Trump clearly
denied this attack, claiming that America has the “best mortality rate” and
declaring the country had “number one mortality fatality [sic] rates.” These
statements all work to deny the attack against the President.
Wallace played a clip of Trump from February 26, 2020, in which
the president declared, “It’s going to be just fine. When you have 15 peo-
ple . . . within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero, that’s a
pretty good job you’ve done. I think we are going to be very good with
the coronavirus. I think that at some point that’s going to sort of just
disappear.” Trump exclaimed, “You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’
I’ll say it again. Its going to disappear and I’ll be right.” The president
disputed the accusation that the pandemic was a serious problem.
Wallace also observed, “I’m sure a lot of people listening right now
are going to say, ‘Trump, he tries to play it down, he tries to make it not
being as serious as it is.’ ” Trump used denial here, too, saying that “I don’t
President Donald Trump’s Image Repair | 45
play it [COVID-19]—I’m not playing it—no, this is very serious.” The pres-
ident explicitly denied that he downplayed the severity of the pandemic.
Straw Argument. Recall that Wallace stated, “Sir, we have the seventh
highest mortality rate in the world.” President Trump appeared to deny
that accusation: “You said we had the worst mortality rate in the world
and we have the best.” A closer look at his words reveals that he actually
denied a different criticism. Wallace had not said that the U.S. had the
worst mortality rate in the world, so Trump disputed an attack that had
not been made, ignoring the actual criticism.
Deflect Attention. The president sought to deflect attention away
from the pandemic in the United States. “It’s not just this country, it’s
many countries. We don’t talk about it in the news. They don’t talk about
Mexico and Brazil and still parts of Europe. . . . Why don’t they talk
about Mexico?” President Trump clearly wanted to shift the discussion in
the news away from COVID-19 in the United States and toward disease
outbreaks elsewhere.
The president also argued that COVID-19 originated in China: “It
came from China. They should’ve never let it escape, they should’ve never
let it out.” This statement seems intended to deflect attention away from
how Trump handled the pandemic once it arrived in the United States.
Bolstering. Trump sought to boost his image in this interview. He
asserted that his accomplishments were superlative: “We did something that
nobody’s ever done. Not only the ventilators, where we’re supplying them all
over the world. We did a testing program the likes of which nobody’s ever
done before.” He cites two examples—supplying ventilators and testing for
COVID-19—that he considered important accomplishments. He asserted
that Dr. Anthony Fauci told him, “You saved tens of thousands of lives.”
He also reinforced his image on other topics. For example, he declared,
“Thank God I built most of the wall, because if I didn’t have the wall
up we would have a much bigger problem with Mexico.” This utterance
suggests that his actions on immigration showed him in a favorable light.
Minimization. Several instances of utterances aimed at reducing the
apparent size of Trump’s alleged failure on the pandemic occur in this
show. He asserted, “Most of those cases are young people that would heal
in a day. They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test. Many of
them—don’t forget I guess it’s like 99.7 percent, people are going to get
better and many cases, they’re going to get better very quickly.” Having
“the sniffles” does not sound like an important consequence from this
46 | Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies
virus. If 99.7 percent of those infected recover, the disease does not appear
serious. The president also noted, “We find cases and many of those cases
heal automatically.” If “automatic” healing occurs in many cases, the virus
seems less calamitous.
President Trump repeatedly attempted to minimize the severity of
the outbreak, arguing that “cases are up because we have the best testing
in the world and we have the most testing.” He also declared, “Cases are
up—many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases. Cases are up because we
have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing.” Trump
suggests that testing makes the virus appear worse than it really is. The
host observed that there were only “6000 cases in the whole European
Union.” The president asserted that this number was low because “they
don’t test, they don’t test.” As a follow-up, Wallace asked, “Is it possible
they don’t have the virus as badly as we do?” Trump rejected this idea,
declaring, “It’s possible they don’t test, that’s what possible.” The president
clearly attributed the large number of cases to greater testing, portraying
the pandemic as less serious.
Differentiation. The host also pointed to the number of cases of
COVID-19 diagnosed each day. Wallace commented, “Seventy-five thou-
sand cases a day.” The president employed differentiation: “Show me the
death chart,” suggesting that the number of cases is comparatively unim-
portant; deaths are what matters. This is an example of differentiation.
Corrective Action. This strategy was not developed with specificity
in the interview. The president expressed a general commitment to solve
the problem: “We’ll put out the flames.” So President Trump attempted
to refurbish his image during the Fox News interview with seven image
repair strategies.
Axios with Jonathan Swan: August 3, 2020
About two weeks after the interview with Wallace, President Trump sat
down with Jonathan Swan of Axios, an American news webpage. During
this interview, he employed six image repair strategies: denial, shift blame,
deflect attention, bolstering, minimization, and defeasibility. Swan almost
immediately asked about the President’s “handling [of] the worst pan-
demic we’ve seen in a century” (all quotations from this interview from
“President Trump Interview” 2020).
Denial. In this interview, Swan observed that “the cases have been
going up and the deaths have been going up.” The president replied
President Donald Trump’s Image Repair | 47
saying, “It has not, come on.” Trump pointed to charts he had brought
to the interview and asserted, “Right here the United States is lowest
in numerous categories, we’re lower than the world.” When called on
this claim by Swan, Trump walked back his boast to “We’re lower than
Europe.” Similarly, Trump asserted, “When you look at death, death is
way down from where it was.” He also declared, “Right now I think it’s
under control.” These utterances work to deny that President Trump was
mishandling the pandemic.
Shift Blame. He argued that the previous administration was to
blame for the pandemic: “We didn’t even have a test. When I took over
we didn’t even have a test.” The implication here is that President Obama,
not President Trump, was responsible for the pandemic.
Deflect Attention. The president complained that the news media
ignored COVID-19 in other countries: “If you watch the fake news on
television, they don’t even talk about it. But you know that there are 188
other countries right now that are suffering, some proportionately far greater
than we are.” He would obviously prefer that the news talked about, and
people thought about, COVID-19 outside the United States rather than
inside it. He continued this theme by naming specific countries and cities:
“Right now Spain is having a big spike. There are tremendous problems
in the world. You look at Moscow, look at what’s going on with Moscow,
look at Brazil, look at these countries what’s going on.” These statements
are attempts to deflect attention away from the pandemic in the United
States to outbreaks elsewhere. President Trump also drew attention to China:
“The virus was sent to us by China.” He also declared, “This is a horrible
plague they sent us. . . . It could have been stopped by China, it should
have been stopped by China.” These statements suggest that Americans
should focus on conditions in China rather than those in the United States.
Bolstering. At one point Trump points to two specific accomplish-
ments: “We’ve done an incredible job” with ventilators. He told the
audience, “I’m working with the governors, I got tremendous amounts of
equipment that they would have never gotten.” He also touted his ban on
travel from Europe: “Putting the ban on Europe [was] not an easy thing
to do.” He also mentions the ban on travel from China: “We’ve done an
incredible job . . . stopping very infected people from China coming in.”
He asserted that he had “saved hundreds of thousands of lives” with his
response to the pandemic.
Trump also employed bolstering by citing his successes in testing for
COVID-19: “We have tested more people than any other country, than
48 | Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies
all of Europe put together times two, we have tested more people than
anybody ever thought of. India has 1.4 billion people, they’ve done 11
million tests. We’ve done 55, it’ll be close to 60 million tests.” As a result
of his actions, he declared, “We saved millions of lives.” The president
complained that the news media did not give him “credit” for testing so
much. These utterances all worked to bolster the president’s reputation
by pointing to accomplishments on the pandemic.
He boasted that the results of his actions on the pandemic were huge:
“We would have probably lost hundreds of thousands of lives” without
his actions. The president asserted that he saved millions of people by
his pandemic response. He alluded to “people that really understand it,
they really understand it, they said it’s incredible the job that we’ve done.”
His interview worked to bolster his reputation concerning the pandemic.
Trump also bolstered by touting successes on other fronts. Trump
boasted that “We were beating China at every single point. . . . We were
taking in billions of dollars.” He also discussed the economy: “Now we’re
opening it [the economy] and we say, by the way, by closing it down
we saved millions of lives.” He acclaims both closing and opening the
economy here.
Trump reinforced his image by showing his compassionate character
when he declared, “One person [dying of COVID-19] is too many.” This
observation suggested that the president cared deeply about COVID-19
deaths. So he bolsters his personality as well as his policies in this interview.
The president stressed his popularity, citing attendance at his June 20,
2020, rally in Tulsa. “We were in a 19,000-seat stadium.” He also boasted
that his speech was “the highest rating in the history of Fox Television
Saturday night. . . . It was the highest rating.” Trump bragged about his
popularity during this interview.
Minimization. Trump argued that the reason the United States had
so many COVID-19 cases was frequent testing. He declared, “What testing
does, it shows where there may be cases. Other countries test, you know
when they test? They test when everybody’s sick, that’s when they test.”
The gist of this argument is that other countries were only testing people
with symptoms, whereas the United States was testing people who were
showing no symptoms. Thus, the United States showed more cases than
other countries. He explained, “Because we’ve done more tests we have
more cases.” So Trump attempted to minimize the extent of the pandemic
by attributing high numbers of infections to testing. Finally, at one point,
he referred to the rate of infection by saying, “It is what it is.” This sounds
President Donald Trump’s Image Repair | 49
as if the president was shrugging his shoulders and saying something like,
“Meh. Not a big deal.”
Defeasibility. President Trump excused his handling of the pandemic
by using defeasibility. He explained that no one understood this disease
because it was a new virus: “Nobody knew the extent, nobody knew
how contagious it was.” Finally, he declared that he was doing the best
he could: “It’s under control as much as you can control it.” So Trump
made an excuse for this disaster by using defeasibility.
ABC News with George Stephanopoulos, September 15, 2020
Trump sat for a third interview about six weeks later, appearing at an
ABC News town hall hosted by George Stephanopoulos on September
15. The host brought up the “number of deaths per million residents”
(all quotations from this interview can be found in ABC News 2020).
Six image repair strategies were employed here: denial, shift blame, straw
argument, deflect attention, bolstering, and minimization.
Denial. The first question in the ABC News town hall was asked
by Paul Tubiana, who identified himself as a diabetic. He said, “I’ve had
to dodge people who don’t care about social distancing and wearing face
masks.” The president rejected the underlying assumption that wearing
masks is a good prevention measure: “A lot of people don’t want to wear
masks. There are a lot of people think that masks are not good.” The host
asked, “Who are those people?” Trump replied by saying, “I’ll tell you
who those people are—waiters.” He seemed to justify his failure to require
mask wearing because waiters do not embrace them.
Stephanopoulos criticized the president when he questioned whether
“we’re doing better in mortality than other countries.” Trump declared, “If
you look at what we’ve done compared to other countries, with the excess
mortality, the excess mortality rate, we’ve done very, very well.” The “excess
mortality rate” is the number of total reported deaths minus the number
of “normal” or expected deaths. He reiterated this claim, arguing that
the United States was doing better than Europe: “The excess mortality is
among the best in the whole world.” The president cited excess mortality
rates to deny this accusation.
Stephanopoulos also accused him of minimizing the severity of the
pandemic: “All through January and February you were downplaying, by
your own admission, the severity of the crisis.” Trump responded with a
clear and explicit denial: “Not downplaying.”
50 | Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies
The president also worked to repair his image on COVID-19 by
maintaining that it would go away on its own:
Trump: It is going to disappear. It’s going to disappear, I still
say it.
Stephanopolous: But not if we don’t take action, correct?
Trump: No, I still say it. It’s going to disappear. . . . It would
go away without the vaccine. . . .
Stephanopolous: It would go away without the vaccine?
Trump: Sure, over a period of time. Sure, with time it goes away.
Trump denied that the pandemic was severe by declaring that it would
go away without any action, even without a vaccine. He rejected criticism
of his handling of COVID-19.
Shift Blame. He also shifted blame for the pandemic response to the
previous administration: “We’re short on ventilators because the cupboards
were bare when we took it over.” Others (i.e., President Obama) were at
fault, so Trump was off the hook.
Straw Argument. The president was blamed for the way he talked
about the virus, accused of downplaying its severity. He replied, “In many
ways I up-played it in terms of action.” Notice that this utterance does not,
in fact, deny that his statements downplayed the severity virus; it boasts
about his actions on COVID-19.
Deflect Attention. In this interview President Trump again attacked
China because COVID-19 came “from China. They should have never let
it happen.” Trump was not accused of bringing the virus into the United
States, so this statement does not shift the blame for his wrongdoing; this
statement seems designed to divert attention away from concerns over his
handling of the pandemic.
Bolstering. Trump bolstered his reputation here by pointing to his
travel bans. “I put a ban on with Europe, I put a ban on. And we would
have lost thousands more people, had I not put the ban on. . . . We did
a very, very good job when we put that ban on. . . . So we saved a lot
of lives when we did that.” Trump declared that his actions saved thou-
sands of lives. He reiterated this idea when he pointed out that “I’m the
one that closed up our country . . . and saved hundreds of thousands of
lives.” Similarly, he bragged that “we could have had two million deaths
President Donald Trump’s Image Repair | 51
if we didn’t close out the country.” These utterances were clearly meant to
reinforce his image by claiming his policies had saved many lives.
The president also boasted about his successes in providing venti-
lators and vaccines, saying, “Look at what we’ve done with ventilators,
and, now, with vaccines.” A more extended statement acclaimed multiple
accomplishments on fighting the pandemic:
We built hospitals. . . . We brought in the [hospital] ships. . . .
When you see our testing, we’re going to be at 84 million
tests. . . . Next would be India with about 50 million testing
programs. . . . We’ve supplied governors . . . with equipment
like nobody’s ever gotten. . . . We’re now making thousands
of ventilators a month . . .—not one person that needed a
ventilator didn’t get a ventilator. . . . We’ve saved a lot of lives,
a tremendous number of lives.
Trump took credit for providing hospitals, tests, ventilators, and swabs.
He asserted that his actions saved many lives.
Trump also boasted of his record on the economy. “The fact is, we
created the greatest economy in the history of the world, best employment
numbers for African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American,
women, everything.” He reiterated this claim by observing, “We hired 10.4
million jobs in four months. That’s a record by far. We have every record.
Retail sales are through the roof. We have every record.” The president
also touted his trade policies in this interview. “We just finished a trade
deal. We just had the largest order of corn in the history of our country
last week, the largest order of soy beans, largest order of beef.” He clearly
wanted people to view his economic record favorably, often saying his
accomplishments were superlative.
The president touched briefly on the idea, introduced in his Axios
interview, that he cared about the victims. He stated that the death toll
is “a terrible number—one is too many.” This statement portrays him as
compassionate.
Minimization. Trump returned to the argument that infections are
high because the United States does so much testing. The president argued,
“We have 20 percent of the cases [in the world] because of the fact that we
do much more testing. If we wouldn’t do testing, we wouldn’t have cases.
You would have very few cases.” This statement worked to minimize the
offensiveness of the pandemic. Table 3.1 displays Trump’s use of image
repair strategies across these interviews.
Table 3.1. President Trump’s Image Repair Strategies in 2020 Interviews
Fox Axios ABC
SD waiters do not think masks help
not downplaying COVID-19 Not downplaying COVID-19
COVID-19 will disappear COVID-19 will disappear
US has lowest mortality rate COVID-19 deaths not going up; US rate excess mortality decreasing
lower than world
COVID-19 under control
SB We did not have a test US cupboard bare of ventilators
SA you said we had worst mortality actions up-played the virus
DA COVID-19 came from China COVID-19 came from China COVID-19 came from China
many countries are worse 188 other countries, many worse
Spain, Moscow, Brazil, Germany
previous administration would have
taken years to get vaccine
Biden said I was xenophobic
want Big 10 football games
BL Testing deserves credit for testing 84 million tests
I built the wall
closed, opened economy closed economy
supplying ventilators worldwide supplying ventilators worldwide supplying ventilators worldwide
Fox Axios ABC
vaccines
hospitals, hospital ships
travel ban travel ban
saved tens of thousands of lives saved millions of lives saved hundreds of thousands of lives
beating China on trade
huge crowds
sent states material/equipment
one death is too many one death is too many
we’ve done an incredible job
dropping AZ, TX, FL
greatest economy
10.4 million jobs
China trade deal
MN most cases heal in one day
just sniffles
99.7% will get better; heal quickly and
automatically
continued on next page
Table 3.1. Continued.
Fox Axios ABC
MN testing caused high rates testing caused high rates testing caused high rates
AZ, TX, FL decreasing
It is what it is
DE nobody knew how deadly
under control as much as possible
DF cases less important than deaths
CA we will put out flames
Evaluation of President Trump’s Image Repair
The image repair utterances will be grouped by strategy for evaluation.
These three hosts challenged some of President Trump’s image repair efforts
during the interviews. Their arguments, which are examples of antapologia
(see Stein 2008), will be noted in this evaluation of his defense.
The context in which this defense was offered is very important.
Abramowitz and Webster (2016) reported that “a growing proportion of
Americans dislike the opposing party more than they like their own party”
(21). As this partisan divide increased, “straight-ticket” voting (casting votes
for candidates representing a single political party) rose as split-ticket voting
(casting a vote for at least one candidate from each political party) declined
(Sabato, Kondik, and Skelley 2016; see also Abramowitz and Webster 2018;
Benoit and Billings 2020). President Trump embodied the huge divide
between Democrats and Republicans: a poll in October 2020 found that
“just 3 percent of Democrats but a whopping 95 percent of Republicans
approve of the job President Trump has done so far” (Bowden 2020). It
seems very likely that the reactions of most Democrats and Republicans
to President Trump’s defense would be diametrically opposed.
Denial. Trump rejected the criticism that he had not handled the
pandemic well, claiming that mortality was lower in the United States
than elsewhere. However, Wallace explained in the initial interview that
the nation had seventh highest mortality in the world: “The U.S. ranked
seventh . . . worse than Brazil and Russia.” In the second interview, Swan
questioned Trump’s claim that mortality in the United States was the
lowest in the world: “Lower than the world?” Trump then retreated to a
more modest defense, saying “We’re lower than Europe.” Swan declared
that “very few” countries had worse mortality rates than the US. Swan
also explained, “You’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking
about death as a proportion of population, that’s where the U.S. is really
bad, much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.” Stephanopoulos also
challenged this claim in the final interview: “You said we’re doing better
in mortality than other countries. But here’s this chart right here. It says
the United States is right here. This is number of deaths per million res-
idents. Here’s Western Europe, here, Canada way down there. We’re not
at the top of the list.” Trump’s defense of his handling of COVID-19 was
weak and challenged by all three hosts. The extent of infection and deaths
from the pandemic undermines Trump’s defense here.
56 | Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies
Trump also rejected the criticism that he had responded ineffectively
to COVID by declaring that the pandemic was under control in July 2020.
In response, Swan asked, “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
The total number of COVID deaths in the United States on President
Trump’s watch (that is, up to January 20, 2021) was 410,777. Between
the time between his statement on August 3, 2020 (when he said it was
under control) and the end of his term, 254,814 people died (“What Is
the Cumulative Number” 2021). This denial was poorly constructed.
The president also claimed that COVID would disappear. The millions
of vaccines given in the United States by the summer of 2021—almost a
year after the President’s assertion—had slowed the pandemic, but it still
had not disappeared by mid-2022. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported
that COVID-19 continued to be one of the leading causes of death in the
United States in June 2021 (Ortaliza et al. 2021). It had not disappeared
under Trump’s leadership.
The president disputed the criticism that he should have supported
the mask mandate. He made the argument that waiters do not like masks.
Obviously, these people are not healthcare professionals.
Trump denied the accusation that he downplayed the pandemic. This
denial is false. In fact, in a tape-recorded interview with Bob Woodward
on March 19, Trump admitted, “I wanted to always play it down. I still
like playing it down” (“Trump Tells Woodward” 2020). Audio of Trump
making this admission was available on the Internet (Breuninger 2020)
and played on news broadcasts, undermining his denial.
Shift Blame. The president tried to shift the blame for the pan-
demic response to the previous administration, observing that ventilator
“cupboards were bare” when he took over as president. The Department
of Health and Human Services noted that “there had been about 19,000
ventilators in the national stockpile for ‘many years,’ ” none of which had
been bought by the Trump administration (Dale 2020). This included
16,660 ventilators that were ready for immediate use in March 2020.
Through June 2020, “the Trump administration had distributed 10,760
ventilators,” less than the number he inherited from Obama’s adminis-
tration. This information indicates that the previous administration had
left the ventilator cupboard full. Second, Trump had assumed office in
January of 2017, so he had been president for three years when COVID
struck the United States in January 2020. The Trump administration had
years to prepare for a possible epidemic but failed to do so; Trump waited
President Donald Trump’s Image Repair | 57
for months after the pandemic struck to order increased production of
ventilators (Dzhanova 2020). His attempt to blame Obama was ineffectual.
President Trump made another attempt to shift the blame to the
previous administration, declaring, “When I took over we didn’t even have
a test.” Swan then asked the obvious question, “Why would you have a
test? The virus didn’t exist.” Trying to blame Obama for not developing a
test for a disease that had not yet occurred was another extremely weak
defense.
Straw Argument. Wallace criticized the president because the United
States had the “seventh highest mortality rate in the world.” Trump tried
to get away with denying a quite different accusation, one that had not
been made: “You said we had the worst mortality rate in the world and
we have the best.” Wallace’s criticism was that the United States had the
seventh highest mortality, not the highest. Furthermore, this straw denial
was another lie, as explained above: The United States did not have the
best mortality rate in the world.
Trump also used a straw argument to respond to accusations that he
had downplayed COVID-19 in his comments about the pandemic, saying
he “up-played” the virus with his actions. Regardless of whether the actions
took were appropriate, he clearly downplayed COVID-19 in his public
statements, and his recorded interviews with Woodward make this clear.
Deflect Attention. Where the virus originated matters; this infor-
mation could help prevent or attenuate future diseases. However, once
the coronavirus struck the United States, President Trump had a duty
to respond appropriately. When he tried to shift blame to China, Swan
pointed out that “it was already here. . . . By the time you banned China
the pandemic was here.” No one blamed Trump for originating the virus;
he was accused of handling the pandemic poorly. He may have hoped
this argument would redirect attention away from him.
The president also tried to redirect attention from his handling
of COVID-19 in the United States to outbreaks of the disease in other
countries (e.g., Spain, Brazil). As noted above, the United States had one
of the highest mortality rates in the world. The US death toll matters even
if a few of the 195 countries in the world are even worse. So this defense
is another example of, “Hey, don’t look here; look over there!”
Bolstering. One instance of bolstering occurred when the president
touted the claim that the United States had the greatest economy. How-
ever, using “the widest measure of economic activity—gross domestic
58 | Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies
product . . . 2020 saw a deep decline. . . . The second quarter was the
worst in records going back to 1947” (Kurz and Yellin 2020). The second
quarter ran from April to June 2020; Trump made this claim in August.
Trump specifically pointed to 10.4 million additional jobs created.
When the pandemic hit the United States, unemployment was 3.5 percent.
By July, it had risen to 10.2 percent (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2021).
It is difficult to see job creation as a huge win for the president.
Trump declared, “These people that really understand it, they really
understand it, they said it’s incredible the job that we’ve done.” If true,
this would be quite a feather in his hat. Swan asked the obvious question
here: “Who says that?” The president failed to provide an answer. Given
the statistics on the number of infections and deaths in the United States
discussed earlier, it is not a plausible assertion.
The president declared in the first interview that he had saved thou-
sands of lives and then asserted that he had saved tens of thousands of
lives. Less than a month later, in his second interview, he stated that he
had saved hundreds of thousands of lives and also claimed that he had
saved millions of lives. Both of these claims were repeated in the third
interview (apparently, he could not make up his mind about how many
lives he had saved). These claims were presented with little evidence
(except for one claim involving Fauci, discussed next) and undercut by
the number of cases and deaths in the United States.
Trump said that Dr. Fauci credited him with saving tens of thousands
of lives. At a congressional hearing, Fauci agreed that Trump’s actions
“saved lives” (Hellmann and Sullivan 2020) but did not say Trump had
saved tens of thousands. However, Fauci also stated that “more lives
would have been saved if the country had acted sooner” (Shapiro 2020).
Accordingly, the president’s claim that Fauci said Trump had saved tens
of thousands of lives is weak at best.
President Trump’s defense included the claim that he “built the
wall” (“most” of it) between the United States and Mexico. This boast
is false. The US-Mexico border spans 1,954 miles (“Trump Wall” 2021).
On June 23, 2020, the Los Angeles Times reported that of the 219 miles
built by President Trump—11 percent—only three miles (.15 percent of
the border) were new walls; the rest was merely refurbishment of existing
walls (Caldera 2020). Trump clearly had not “built” the wall nor even a
substantial portion of it.
At one point, the president bragged about the massive crowds who
attended his rally. Swan punctured this attempt at bolstering when he
President Donald Trump’s Image Repair | 59
asked, “Why would you want a huge crowd? Cases were skyrocketing.”
These crowds were potential super-spreader events. Swan also explained,
“I think you misunderstand me. I’m not criticizing your ability to draw
a crowd. . . . You draw massive crowds, you get huge ratings. I’m asking
about the public health.” The president seemed to believe that attracting
large crowds was more important than protecting Americans’ health.
Trump attempted to bolster his image by saying he deserved credit
for testing. Swan observed, “If hospital rates were going down and deaths
were going down, I’d say terrific. You deserve to be praised for testing. But
they’re all going up. . . . 60,000 Americans are in the hospital. A thousand
are dying a day.” Tests can identify who has contracted the disease, so tests
were necessary but insufficient to fix the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump also tried to bolster his image by reporting that he was
supplying ventilators and vaccines, providing hospitals, and sending states
equipment including swabs. These actions are all praiseworthy. The pres-
ident also touted his travel bans. This was another praiseworthy action.
However, as Swan pointed out, Trump banned travel from China after
COVID-19 was already in the United States. So these actions could have
helped his image.
Trump offered another instance of bolstering in the last two inter-
views, saying that “a single death is too many.” This is an appropriate
sentiment, suggesting a positive aspect to his character. It is not possible
to know how heartfelt it was, but we do know, as discussed below, that he
also said in the second interview, “It is what it is.” This statement does not
sound like “Every death is terrible.” His attempts at bolstering provided
minimal help to his image.
Minimization. Trump also used testing as the basis for minimization,
declaring, “Because we’ve done more tests we have more cases.” Wallace
used statistics to dispute this claim: “Sir, testing is up 37 percent. . . . Cases
are up 194 percent. It isn’t just that testing has gone up, it’s that the virus
has spread.” Trump declared in the ABC News town hall, “If we wouldn’t
do testing, we wouldn’t have cases.” However, these people would be sick
whether they had been tested or not. Furthermore, in the final interview,
Trump declared, “What testing does, it shows where there may be cases”
(emphasis added). This is wrong: COVID-19 testing shows where cases
exist. In this defense, Trump guesses rates in other countries would be
higher with more testing; we know the United States had high rates of
COVID-19 infection. The fact that cases had risen over five times as
much as tests (from 37 percent to 194 percent) eviscerates this defense.
60 | Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies
Trump’s defense worked to minimize the perceived harms of
COVID-19. In the first interview, he declared that most cases healed in a
single day, that the virus only caused sniffles, that almost everyone (99.7
percent) got better, and that infections healed quickly and automatically.
These assertions, all made without evidence, were belied by the frequen-
cies of COVID-19 infections and deaths. For example, the average length
of hospital stay (outside China) ranged from four to twenty-one days
(Rees et al. 2020). Furthermore, Trump acknowledged to Woodward on
February 7 that “it was ‘deadly stuff,’ and ‘more deadly than your—even
your strenuous flus’ ” (Santucci 2020). Trump dropped this attempt at
minimization after the first interview.
Another form of minimization cropped up in the second interview,
when Trump stated that the pandemic “is what it is.” This sounds as if
he was shrugging his shoulders or saying “Meh.” The infection and death
rates could have been much lower if the president had reacted more
appropriately; it did not have to be what it was.
Defeasibility. Trump tried to excuse his actions by arguing that
nobody knew how serious COVID-19 was. Swan disputed this argument,
asserting, “Mr. President, by June we knew.” However, Trump actually knew
months earlier: evidence from Woodward’s audio recordings established
that Trump knew by February 7 that this disease was deadly. This defense
was inadequate.
At one point the president hedged his claim of success in handling
the coronavirus by asserting that it was under control as much as possible.
The president could have done more to combat the pandemic, so it was
not controlled as much as possible. He also defended his response by
explaining that we had no test for COVID-19. Of course, as noted above,
there could be no existing test for a newly emerged disease. In fact, a test
was developed rapidly: the FDA authorized shipment of a COVID-19
test on January 5, 2020 (Foster 2020). His use of defeasibility was weak.
Differentiation. Trump wanted to assess the pandemic using the num-
ber of cases rather than the number of deaths, asserting that “you have to
go by the cases” rather than deaths. Wallace noted that “the death chart
is a thousand cases a day.” Many people would surely think these deaths
were a serious problem. Swan also commented that “the figure I look at
is death. And death is going up now, it’s 1,000 a day.” Trump conceded
it was high “if you look at death” rather than cases. Differentiation did
not work here for the president.
President Donald Trump’s Image Repair | 61
Corrective Action. The initial interview with Wallace also contained
an instance of corrective action. Promising that his administration would
“put out the flames,” without any details, is not persuasive. Nor does the
record of cases and deaths throughout the remainder of his term in office
provide confidence in this vague promise.
Conclusion and Implications
Table 3.1 shows a great deal of consistency across these interviews: denial
of high mortality rates, deflecting attention to other countries, bolstering
by claiming to have saved many lives, bolstering his testing, and stating
that testing causes high rates of infection. However, some strategies were
abandoned along the way. Trump’s instance of bolstering by claiming that
he built the border wall was dropped after the first interview. Similarly,
his attempts to minimize the damage of the disease (claiming that most
cases heal in a day, those infected just suffer some sniffles, 99.7 percent
heal quickly) in the first interview were never reused. The claim that the
Obama administration had not left him a vaccine surfaced in the second
interview and then sank out of sight. Defeasibility (claims that no one
knew how deadly the coronavirus was, COVID-19 was under control as
much as possible, we had no test for this virus) also was only used in
the second interview.
Trump’s image repair efforts might have prevented further declines
in his reputation (his approval rating improved slightly after these mes-
sages). His message resonated with some, but not most, of his audience.
An AP-NORC public opinion poll conducted in early October found that
65 percent of respondents believed that “Trump had not taken the corona-
virus outbreak in the U.S. seriously” (Pace, Fingerhut, and Ellgren 2020).
A Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted after the third interview, “found 37% of
American adults approved of the president’s handling of the pandemic
and 59% disapproved” (Whiteside 2020). Table 3.2 shows his disapproval
rating ranged from 55 percent to 57 percent in this time period. President
Trump lost the election, despite his debunked claims that massive fraud
cost him the election (as attested to by the United States Department of
Homeland Security: Al-Arshani 2020; by Attorney General Barr: Balsamo
2022; by the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Durkee 2020; by Republi-
can Senate Majority Leader McConnell: McConnell 2021) and his failed
62 | Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies
Table 3.2. Donald Trump’s Approval Rating
7/19 8/3 9/15
6/30 Fox 7/23 Axios 8/12 9/13 ABC 9/28 10/1
Approve 38% — 41% — 42% 42% — 46% 43%
Disapprove 57% — 56% — 55% 56% — 52% 55%
Gallup 2020.
lawsuits over voter fraud (Shamsian and Sheth 2021; see also Danforth et
al. 2022). Joe Biden won over 81 million votes and 306 electoral college
votes; Trump received over 74 million votes and 232 electoral college
votes (USA Today 2021). Even Fox News called the election for Biden
(Steinhauser and Singman 2020).
This defense was fraught with flaws, relying heavily on lies, unsup-
ported assertions, and weak defenses. All three of these hosts repeatedly
punctured Trump’s defenses. Of course, many of the president’s supporters
would sharply disagree with this conclusion. His appeals did not fall only
on deaf ears: as just noted, Trump received over 70 million votes but failed
to persuade enough voters to win the Oval Office. It is possible that his
image repair efforts helped his reputation to some extent, although his
approval rating never surpassed his disapproval rating.
This analysis provides insight into Trump’s handling of a deadly
pandemic and a partial explanation for his loss in the 2020 presidential
elections. These defensive messages may not have lost the election for
Trump (many factors influence election outcomes), but they failed to turn
the tide in Trump’s favor. This essay illustrates how interview hosts can
enact antapologia (Stein 2008). This analysis adds two new image repair
strategies: deflect attention (“Whataboutism”) and straw argument. Both
newly identified strategies occurred in these three interviews. Deflecting
attention has become a fixture of Republican politics (this not to say Dem-
ocrats never use it; see Benoit 2022): Marcotte argued that when unable to
defend themselves, conservatives use “ ‘whataboutism’ to deflect criticism”
(2021; see also Kurtzleben 2017). Deflecting attention is an important
image repair strategy and merits more scholarly attention.