We Have It Totally Under Control? Exploring the Effects of Ideology and Knowing Someone Diagnosed With COVID-19 on Evaluations of President Trump’s Leadership on the Pandemic

• Date: 01 January 2022
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Author: Laine P. Shay,Jason S. Byers
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211041319
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 50(1) 83 –96

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211041319

American Politics Research

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211041319

journals.sagepub.com/home/apr

Article

“I think we’ve done a fantastic job.”

—President Donald J. Trump1

On March 13, 2020, President Donald Trump declared a

national emergency due to the 2019 to 2020 coronavirus pan-

demic (Restuccia et al., 2020). To help manage the pandemic,

President Trump took various steps to slow the spread of the

virus. For example, in January 2020, President Trump imple-

mented restrictions on individuals traveling from China to

the United States (Leary & Abbott, 2020). Shortly thereafter,

he established the Coronavirus Task Force, which was

headed by Vice President Mike Pence, and it included promi-

nent individuals such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr.

Robert R. Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention; Dr. Deborah Birx, Coordinator of

the White House Coronavirus Response Task Force; and Dr.

Jerome Adams, U.S. Surgeon General.2 In an effort to save

the economy, President Trump signed a $2 trillion stimulus

bill, the largest in U.S. history, designed to help individuals,

small businesses, big corporations, and the health industry

(Snell, 2020).

While some of President Trump’s policies were bold and

necessary, several of his decisions related to COVID-19 have

been met with mixed reactions. For instance, some argue that

the president downplayed the pandemic at a campaign rally

in South Carolina by saying that the Democrat’s criticism of

his response was a “hoax,” and he likened COVID-19 to the

common flu (Dale, 2020). Critics of the Trump administra-

tion have also asserted that he should have done more to

protect communities of color who have been disproportion-

ately affected by the pandemic (Soifer, 2020). Finally,

President Trump made the unprecedented move of attempt-

ing to withdraw the United States from the World Health

Organization (Hinshaw & Armour, 2020).3 The New York

Times Editorial Board (2020) unleashed a stinging cri-

tique of this brash move by describing it as a “terrible

solution” to the pandemic.

Given that the pandemic resulted in President Trump pur-

suing policies that have never been considered before, one

question of clear importance is related to how the public

1041319APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211041319American Politics ResearchByers and Shay

research-article2021

1Davidson College, Davidson, NC, USA

2Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Laine P. Shay, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, 6300 Ocean Drive,

Corpus Christi, TX 78412-5815, USA.

Email: laine.shay@tamucc.edu

We Have It Totally Under Control?

Exploring the Effects of Ideology and

Knowing Someone Diagnosed With

COVID-19 on Evaluations of President

Trump’s Leadership on the Pandemic

Jason S. Byers1 and Laine P. Shay2

Abstract

President Donald Trump has made various decisions, many controversial, to manage the coronavirus pandemic. The reaction

to President Trump’s leadership has been met with a mixed response from the public. This raises an important question;

what factors influence a citizen’s evaluation of President Trump’s response to the pandemic? We develop a theory that

links a citizen knowing someone diagnosed with COVID-19 with their evaluation of President Trump’s management of the

pandemic, with the expectation that this relationship is conditioned by a citizen’s ideology. Using data from two surveys,

we find that knowing someone diagnosed with COVID-19 diminishes the effect ideology has on a citizen’s evaluation.

Additionally, we find that a citizen’s evaluation of President Trump’s leadership on COVID-19 is associated with their vote

choice in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Overall, this article contributes to our understanding of public opinion on

COVID-19 and its political ramifications.

Keywords

American politics, health policy, public opinion, COVID-19, ideology