Donald Trump’s gotta love COVID-19.

How could he not? This virus is a dream come true for Orange Julius Caesar: It’s chaotic, it’s unpredictable, it’s ruthless, it’s divisive.

Just like him.

Trump is a child of chaos — so much so that, if things get too calm, he creates it himself. But even more than chaos, he thrives on division. And what could be more divisive than a virus that’s killing some people and costing others their jobs?

Trump’s modus operandi has always been “divide and conquer.” If he can pit the fear of dying against the fear of going broke, he’ll do it in a heartbeat. He’ll pick a side, pretend he cares about the people on that side, and appoint himself as their champion.

Which side doesn’t matter, so long as he’s winning.

Doing the math

So, which side will he choose?

As of May 21, there had been more than 1.6 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, and more than 95,000 deaths.

Meanwhile, more than 38 million people had filed for unemployment since the crisis began.

Do the math. Even if the coronavirus toll has been undercounted, as some suggest, you’ve got at most a few million sick people on one side and THIRTY-EIGHT million unemployed on the other. It’s not hard to guess where Trump’s gonna land on this.

“It’s possible there will be some (death) because you won’t be locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is,” Trump said. ‘We have to open our country. I’m not saying anything is perfect, and, yes, will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon.”

He said it so offhandedly, it’s amazing he didn’t utter the words “collateral damage.” He called the would-be victims “warriors” — even though he’s treating them more like cannon fodder for the front lines.

No empathy

None of this is to suggest that the economic fallout from the virus should be ignored. In fact, the opposite is true. No one should be treating those 38 million unemployed citizens like cannon fodder in a war against the virus, either. A responsible leader would acknowledge that the virus is taking a devastating toll on both the nation’s health and its economy. A responsible leader would show empathy toward both sides.

But empathy has never been Trump’s strong suit. It’s not even in his toolkit. The only time he talks about seeing both sides is when that very comment is, in itself, divisive: creating a false equivalency between neo-Nazis and their opponents during a deadly confrontation in Virginia, for example.

A responsible leader would look solutions that protect people’s health and their jobs as much as possible. The obvious way to do that would have been to respond quickly and aggressively to the virus threat. If Trump had gotten out in front of it, it might have been contained — or at least mitigated — and the economic damage might have been minimized, as well.

But Trump didn’t do that, and the question is, why?

What we don’t know

There are a couple of possible answers, but ignorance isn’t among them: Trump was warned repeatedly of the virus’ potential to create a full-blown crisis during daily briefings in January and February. These warnings did not lead him to act.

It’s conceivable that Trump simply didn’t want to look bad.

And he hates to look bad. He realizes that the first step down the path toward negative publicity is admitting something’s wrong. This is why he famously refuses, at almost every turn, to admit he’s made a mistake.

Predictably, Trump has refused to take responsibility for the nation’s disastrous response to COVID-19. In fact, he’s called that response “maybe our best work,” even as more people have contracted the disease and died in the United States than anywhere else on the planet.

Yet Trump’s own words reveal that his response to the virus has been guided, not by what’s effective, but by what makes him look good. According to The New York Times, he said that more testing for the virus only revealed more infections, raising the numbers: “In a way, by doing all this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

In other words, what we don’t know can’t hurt Trump... but it can kill us.

Opening the floodgates

That sounds corrupt, to put it mildly, but Trump’s other possible motivation is even more sinister. Is it possible that Trump actually ignored those warnings back in January because he wanted the virus to spread?

At first, this might seem unthinkable. Even someone as callous and self-serving as Trump wouldn’t consciously throw open the floodgates to a lethal virus.

Would he?

Consider the evidence. We already know that the virus has been more widespread and more lethal in the United States than anywhere else on the planet. So, clearly, Trump and his administration are doing something wrong.

We also know that Trump values appearances over results. Would he rather let people suffer and die from the virus than perform tests so they can receive treatment? Just check out his quote above.

And not only did he ignore those warnings back in January, he continued to endorse behavior that promoted the spread of the disease after it took hold.

False confidence

For one thing, he touted bogus treatments such as injecting bleach, exposing yourself to sunlight, and using drug normally prescribed for malaria, lupus and arthritis (hydroxychloroquine) as a treatment. Clinical trials found the drug had no effect on COVID-19 and made severely ill patients more likely to die. But Trump has not only continued to promote its use, he decided to start taking it himself... even though he doesn’t have the virus.

What if people with lupus or arthritis can’t get the drug because people like Trump start taking it preventatively for something it doesn’t even work on? Does it matter to Trump? Seems not. What matters is that it looks like Trump is doing something to combat the disease, even if he already knows it doesn’t work.

The result is to instill a false sense of confidence in a public eager for anything that looks like progress. But if that confidence causes them become less cautious about spreading the disease, guess what’s going to happen?

It’s gonna spread farther and faster.

Then there’s Trump’s refusal to wear a mask, even though masks can reduce coronavirus transmission by 75 percent. Together with his support of mask-free protests, this is just another way he’s creating false confidence — and thus encouraging the spread of the disease.

And now the latest: Trump has deemed houses of worship “essential” and called for them to open immediately, just days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 35 of 92 people who attended a single church service in Arkansas tested positive for coronavirus. Three of them died, and the 35 who were infected spread the disease to 26 others.

Consider then that churches have options. There’s always the internet. And just this past Sunday, I passed a church that was conducting a drive-in service, where people remained in their cars. Then there’s the Bible itself, which quotes Jesus himself as saying he is present wherever two or more are gathered together in his name. That’s the New Testament. The Old Testament (Hebrew scripture) has this, attributed to King Solomon, addressing God: “Even heaven, the highest heaven, cannot contain you, much less this temple I have built.

What is Trump thinking? It’s clear he wants to show the religious right he’s on their side, just like he’s on the side of business. But is there more to it than that? Does he, on some level, want the virus to spread?

Motivations

Here’s another question, though: Why would Trump seek to promote the spread of a disease that has been so devastating to the economy? After all, the argument goes, the economy has performed well during his time in office — something he’s repeatedly boasted about.

Besides, incumbent presidents typically don’t do well at the polls when the economy is in trouble. Just ask either President Bush.

Trump is, supposedly, a salesman. So why on Earth would he want to undermine his biggest selling point?

Because Trump’s specialty isn’t really sales, it’s marketing.

In general terms, marketers take their products to the most likely buyers, while salespeople let the buyers come to them. Think of it in terms of the automotive industry. Marketers create ads for trucks and air them during football games, because they know guys who watch football are most likely to buy trucks. Salespeople stand around on the car lot and wait for customers to come to them.

The goals of a marketer and a salesperson might seem the same on the surface, but they’re really quite different. Salespeople want to get as many people as possible to buy what they’re selling, while marketers want to identify, isolate and target those most likely to do so.

Marketing, not sales

Which brings us back to Trump.

No truly effective salesman would file for corporate bankruptcy protection six times. But an effective marketer would identify a target audience, create brand loyalty within that audience and keep them coming back for more.

That’s exactly what Trump has done. The press refers to Trump’s target audience as his “political base,” but it’s really the same thing.

Those truck companies that air ads during football games couldn’t care less about what the rest of the family thinks of them. They know a teenager who’s into gaming isn’t going to go out and buy a truck; all they care about is keeping Dad’s attention on the screen even if Junior wants to use the commercial break to brag about winning a battle royale on Fortnite.

Trump wants the same thing. He wants the spotlight to stay on him, and he wants his target audience to keep watching.

This singular focus on his target audience/base fuels Trump’s obsession with being the Divider-in-Chief. Like any marketer, he has divided those who are receptive to his message from those who aren’t — and he believes that, in order to succeed, he must continue to do so.

Creating crises

Many have noted Trump’s propensity for creating crises in order to solve them. There was real fear in some quarters that Trump would start a war to rally support in the runup to the 2020 election.

Maybe he’s done just that. Trump has, in compared the coronavirus pandemic to a war — calling Americans “warriors,” likening the virus’ spread to Pearl Harbor, and even calling himself a “wartime president.”

No, Trump didn’t create the virus, but he’s certainly using it as a pretext to motivate his base. And if it works to that end, it’s in his personal and political interest to prolong the pandemic.

The pundits have it half right: Trump creates crises — but not to solve them. He creates them to motivate his target audience to buy what he’s selling. He doesn’t need to solve a problem. He only has to convince them that he can, and that he’s the only one who can. Actually coming up with a solution may not be in his best interest at all, because it can remove the external factor he’s using to motivate his buyers.

If he’s already discredited the competition (in this case, the Democrats) in the minds of his target audience, that audience has no choice but to buy what he’s selling. But — and this is key — they must feel the need to buy at all. This is where the virus comes in. It creates the need to buy that’s crucial in marketing.

A good marketer knows that beating the competition won’t matter if the customer doesn’t need the product in the first place. A single guy might walk past a jewelry store and see a diamond ring selling for half the price he’d seen in a competitor’s window. But it won’t matter if he’s not planning to get engaged. The need has to be there. Fear and crisis are the best tools in creating and perpetuating that sense of need.

Motive and evidence

So, it might seem odd that Trump would want to undercut his greatest strength — economic prosperity. But that’s precisely what he needs to do in order to present himself as the person who can fix this new crisis.

His argument: He presided over a strong economy before, and he can do so again. After all, the virus was beyond his control.

Or was it, really?

If social-distancing measures had been in place a week earlier (in early March), one model shows, nearly 36,000 American lives could have been saved. That’s the same time Trump was falsely reassuring the nation that the virus would simply “go away.”

Instead of doing anything to stop it, he was letting it spread. Not because he hadn’t been warned. So why? To make himself look good? To make the crisis worse, even at the cost of American lives, as part of a nefarious marketing strategy for 2020?

There’s motive, evidence and a clear pattern of behavior to support that allegation. Draw your own conclusions.

Note: For more observations on Trump and his relationship with the media, check out the author’s book, “Media Meltdown: In the Age of Trump.”