Plum Line’s Greg Sargent made a plea Wednesday not to let President “I don’t take responsibility at all” rewrite history before our eyes.
Each day, there is another coronavirus briefing starring Donald Trump. Each day, his team claims progress. Trump claims credit. Nothing much happens. Each day, there is more smoke blown up the national ass. Each day, more people fall sick and die with many, many more on the way.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that as requests for help pour into the White House, too little is happening weeks after the pandemic crisis began unfolding here, months after it was clearly on its way. Federal agencies and their combined resources remain sidelined over eight weeks into the crisis:
Even after Mr. Trump committed to supporting the states on Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers said it still had not received direction from the administration.
“We need the federal government to play its role,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said Monday. “The federal government has tremendous capacity.”
Much of that capacity is untapped. Hospital ships are at port. The Department of Veterans Affairs, legally designated as the backup health care system in national emergencies, awaits requests for help. The veterans department has a surplus of beds in many of its 172 hospital centers and a robust number of special rooms for patients with breathing disorders.
The sprawling system of emergency doctors and nurses ready to be deployed by the Department of Health and Human Services — known as the National Disaster Medical System — is also still waiting for orders, other than to staff locations where passengers offloaded from cruise ships are being quarantined.
The real heroes are in the hospitals and in the states, governors struggling to fill the leadership vacuum at the top. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told reporters last Friday the federal response has been completely inadequate.
“We’ve been contacting this administration every single day since [March 3],” she said, “and we have received nothing. Zip. Zero. Nothing from them.”
Sargent adds, “Trump will not take responsibility for whatever we learn about his government’s failures, no matter how bad they are established to be.” He is actively prioritizing his reelection over saving American lives. Any efforts “to reconstruct the actual story, or inform the public about it, or impose accountability for it must be entirely discredited.”
Trump’s first impulse is to treat the pandemic as a public relations problem.
Political scientist Max Skidmore literally wrote the book on presidential responses to pandemics. Skidmore tells Sargent Trump’s dismissal of the disease’s seriousness and his dissemination of disinformation will cost lives:
“We have seen presidents who refused to learn from the past,” Skidmore said. “But one great danger of the Trump presidency is that he’s uninterested in performance as long as he can create the image that he’s been successful. Actual success is irrelevant to him. The image of success is what’s important.”
Timelines exist and video that document the truth. Barry Rubin (@barubin) of The Bulwark has been compiling a greatest hits reel of Trump’s changing story.
Jamie Carter (@JCTheResistance) supplies more from others keeping score:
And so on.
For all the public-private partnership cheerleading in each day’s briefing, out in the field the private sector appears not to be the solution to our problem. For some, it is the problem.
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