Jules Witcover

WASHINGTON — The horrific milestone of 100,000 American deaths in four months has emphatically contradicted President Trump’s prediction that the coronavirus crisis would peak and soon vanish.

As millions of other countrymen and women mourn a loss of life that surpasses those in our recent shooting wars, Trump continues to brush it aside. He refuses to appear in public wearing a protective face mask, out of contempt for scientific dictates and others’ safety, and in apparent personal vanity.

While other American eyes are glued on the woeful rising death toll, the former hotel tycoon monitors the stock market and the shrinking national economy imperiling his November re-election prospects.

Not content with preserving his own macho image, he mocks presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for wearing a mask at a Memorial Day observance at a Delaware war monument near his home, where Biden observes his state’s stay-at-home edict.

Biden’s self-confinement is said to worry Democratic supporters of the former vice president, fearing it cramps his well-known style of face-to-face campaigning and old-fashioned schmoozing.

Trump, meanwhile, ignores any stay-at-home orders by boarding Air Force One for taxpayer-financed visits to political battleground states, inspecting antivirus-related facilities as justification.

The forced hiatus imposed on the 2020 presidential campaign, however, also gives Biden an uncommon opportunity to plan not only his own campaign strategy, but also for a presidency that appears increasingly possible once his nomination is assured.

As many as a dozen states still are unable to hold primaries or other delegate-selecting events, and the status of the Democratic National Convention scheduled for Milwaukee is uncertain. Biden is said to be conferring endlessly with party officials and political advisers on the shape, content and personnel of a Biden administration.

In a recent long and perceptive New York Magazine article, Biden is portrayed as “planning an FDR-sized presidency” that if laid out by him publicly in coming months could go a long way toward easing concerns about his age (77, turning 78 in November) and his reputation in some circles for being a loose cannon.

In one sense, the current coronavirus pandemic has turned the 2020 presidential campaign into a referendum on Trump’s performance in office and his qualification for four more years there.

With Biden widely seen as a gregarious straight-arrow politician compared with the unorthodox incumbent from the world of cutthroat commerce, the issue of personal empathy could well come to play in the challenger’s favor.

Biden’s reputation in Delaware and in the Senate as a man with a big heart but a loose tongue has served him well for nearly half a century. He brings both qualities to his competition with a man devoid of the first characteristic and having the second one in fierce overabundance. The distinction could well decide the election outcome in November.

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Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.

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