The Political Branding of COVID-19: A Narrative Explained by President Trump’s Five Stages of Grief

Abstract

COVID-19 was particularly deadly and widespread in the United States because of political incompetence at both state and federal levels, a non-compliant public that flouted prescribed safety measures, and a distrust of science and expertise. At the heart of all of these issues was the branding of the disease as a partisan problem. In 2019, I published the book "Political Brands," which described the hardening of partisan information silos among the American electorate. I wrote this book before the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (“COVID-19”) pandemic erupted in the United States. A coronavirus cannot pick a side of a political fight. But the way the American public processed COVID-19 fell into the same information silos described in "Political Brands" that facilitated partisan differences of opinion on the presidency of Donald Trump, the legality of his actions, and the appropriateness of his impeachment. To over-simplify, the disease itself became branded politically, and how the individual responded to the deadly pandemic was determined by which silo they occupied.