We’ve seen that countries with female leaders have fared better in the midst of this global pandemic, probably due to their openness to a diversity of ideas and collaboration. On the other side of the pendulum are those who are obstinately opposed to these female-oriented traits: those conforming “to the swaggering ideals of masculinity.” In this blog post, I want to focus on two leaders in particular who embody this dangerous ideal: US President Trump and Russian President Putin.
While fundamentally on a different level power-wise, both are leaders of Democracies, whose power originates in the people. Both of them are acutely sensitive to the cult of personality that surrounds them – the maintenance of which ensures their re-election. While Trump stood on his soapbox (read: daily news briefings through March and April) discussing his administration’s successful response to the coronavirus, Putin graced his countrymen with fewer, albeit equally factual, updates throughout the last several months of the crisis.
University College London Russian politics professor Ben Noble, in an interview with Time’s Madeline Roache, remarked that taking a step back and letting others “call the difficult shots...(is) a familiar Putin playbook move that we’ve seen before. He doesn’t want to be in leadership when he thinks it can backfire on him.” The steps to take in the case of a global pandemic – instating shelter-in-place orders, forbidding large gatherings, for example – might be unpopular, but are necessary. This aversion to associating the federal government with negative coronavirus connotations goes so far, Meduza accounts, that
Putin doesn’t want “to scare the people” with “noisy emergency measures.” As a result, the Kremlin has described federal policy in the most neutral terms possible, like “universal self-isolation” and “non-working week.” Another source in one of Russia’s regional governments confirmed to Meduza that the authorities are even trying to avoid using the word “quarantine.”
The actions taken by the president’s office have been few and include an early March rallying cry against foreign-spread fake news about rampant coronavirus cases in Moscow, a month-long mandatory paid leave for all non-essential workers in Russia, and further popular economic relief programs in April.
In the United States, the president has been similarly inactive, passing a limited number of flashy executive orders, including one about hoarding health and medical resources, and another protecting the liability of meat processers due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 in their factories; and a few incredibly broad, inoperable ones such as this one and this one.
Local leaders stepping up
Both leaders delegated the vast majority of responsibility, and the expected flak, to their federal and local governments. In Russia, Putin physically removed himself from Moscow and avoided declaring a state of emergency in favor of allotting his prime minister and government cabinet the same emergency powers that a state of emergency would have afforded him. (Even this year he isn’t always so reserved about declaring states of emergency when his rapid action can create good PR) While Trump did declare a national emergency on March 13, he matched Putin’s actions a few days later, delegating authority via executive order to various healthcare departments on March 27. One reason, Meduza notes, that the Russian government shied away from declaring a state of emergency for this matter, is that it would open up a legal avenue for citizens to sue to damages against the federal government.
In this situation, the governors and big city mayors have to decide what to do with the limited resources that they have – and have to coordinate between themselves, rather than being able to go through the overarching federal government.
Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, has implemented sweeping efforts to contain the virus, calling out false government numbers, and leading other local leaders in his efforts to contain the incredible surge of infections in Moscow. Even before Putin’s delegation of authority at the end of March, regional leaders began implementing quarantine measures in imitation of Moscow’s strategy.
Sobyanin’s de facto position as authority and director for the actions of other regional leaders echoes New York governor Cuomo’s role as “America’s governor.” Susan Milligan of US News remarked at the end of March that,
While Cuomo is technically only in charge of the matter as it affects the Empire State, political observers say he is filling the leadership role for people across the nation, especially as Trump's briefings offer mixed messages, personal grievances by the president and feuds with the press.
On Twitter, Trump celebrated governors’ responses to their local outbreaks, specifically calling out Cuomo as an effective leader of New York State. Both Putin and Trump were largely discredited by leaving their governors to take action, with Trump taking partial credit for their successes and leaving the blame on them in their failures.
Several Russian governors resigned under the pressure of facing charges of criminal negligence in any failure to contain COVID-19 in their region. Website War on the Rocks interprets this harsh standard as an attempt to conceal the Kremlin’s limited reach into these regions. When Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, sealed his region’s borders from the rest of Russia on April 1, the Kremlin condemned the action, saying he did not have the right, but stood down when Kadyrov held his ground.
How their reactions reflect different political priorities
The Guardian reports that,
In discussions with his subordinates, Putin at times has looked deeply bored. As his health minister discussed regional payouts on Wednesday, the president distractedly rolled a pen back and forth across his desk, lost in a moment of reverie broadcast nationwide.
Once he offloaded the responsibility for responding to the crisis to his subordinates, why wouldn’t he be bored with these irrelevant updates? This contrasts with Trump’s aforementioned daily news briefings in March and April remarking on his successes and others’ failures only in substance. The only aspects of the health crisis that the two leaders truly care about are how it affects their reputation – which manifests in approval ratings. Painting oneself as the hero of the pandemic can be equated to completely removing oneself from most of the public eye when you consider that the projected result of both is a lack of negative coverage.
There have been some significant demonstrations in Russia by coronavirus-deniers as well as those angry about the government’s reaction to the coronavirus, but they have been swiftly put down. One can compare this to the Trump’s seemingly opposite reaction, Tweeting in support of the armed Michigan protestors at the beginning of May. However, both suppressing dissent and siding with it create the same result: there is no dissent directed at either president.
The economic downturn in both countries spell disaster for both presidents, as Trump ran on his promise to help the economy, and Putin’s “approval ratings have been largely tied to Russia’s economic fortunes,” says aforementioned Russian politics scholar Ben Noble. Trump expected to be able to point at the strong economy he had cultivated over his past three years in office, but his re-election campaign instead is falling back on the tired trope of MAGA, without the galvanizing rallies that were so essential to Trump’s initial election.
Rather than reflect on the countries’ feeble economies, both presidents have largely focused on other aspects of their political agenda. Putin pushed a series of constitutional amendments through the Duma that allow him to remain president until 2036. Trump maintained his campaigns against mail-in voting and immigration through executive orders and Tweets. Looking at the front page of Channel 1 Russia, all you can see is cheery coverage of Russian COVID-19 patients getting better and other countries’ pandemic responses failing.
Choosing short-term wins over sustained leadership
After abruptly stopping his daily news briefings after suggesting that injecting disinfectant into one’s body could be helpful against COVID-19, Trump recontinued them on July 20. On that very same day, he embraced the use of face masks. His inaction had hurt his re-election prospects to the extent that his Democratic presidential challenger holds a 10-point lead in national polls. Almost in step with his resuming public appearances concerning the coronavirus, Trump’s re-election poll numbers stopped dropping.
Given the widespread reports of ballot stuffing in the Russian nationwide vote about the constitutional amendments, Putin seems to be relatively secure in his job stability, despite his approval ratings plummeting to 58%. The New York Times describes how Putin’s retreat in the face of the pandemic increased “public trust in provincial leaders while eroding confidence in Mr. Putin, who lost his aura as a can-do man of action.”
His focus on releasing a vaccine as soon as possible points to his awareness of this loss. On August 11, Russia was the first country to grant regulatory approval to a potential COVID-19 vaccine, which is currently in the equivalent of Phase 1 clinical trials. The aim: to start mass production in September. The true goal, however, seems to be to publicize a huge win for the country to drown out any negative news stories (a theme echoed in the Trump presidency from the beginning – see this chart of 2018). While not as extreme as in Russia, Trump’s Operation Warp Speed is run with the same motivation to produce a “magic solution” of creating and distributing the fastest vaccine in history.
There is no abracadabra in a global pandemic. People need leaders to turn to when they are scared; to trust the words of when they assess whether or not it is safe to go outside. They need leaders who work for the country rather than their own sense of self-worth. I hope this analysis showed how these two countries’ leaders failed on these regards.
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An update from the previous post: tens of thousands of protestors showed up on August 8 in Khabarovsk, a month after their governor Furgal was arrested. One activist estimated that 50,000 showed up this past weekend (though official accounts put the number at 2,800). There have been spates of arrests, but the mass of individuals keeps coming back.