That giant sucking sound you hear is the leadership vacuum of the most incompetent, feckless administration in U.S. history. The acting president who has treated the coronavirus as a messaging problem finally rolled out his plan for filling that vacuum in a Rose Garden press conference Friday.
Donald Trump announced a national emergency over the pandemic in a ploy to arrest a stock market in free fall. He will compensate for his leadership deficits with a team of CEOs — men, naturally — from the country’s largest retailers and health care firms. That’s his plan anyway. Or rather, their plan.
Amid shaking hands(!) with them and dismissing suggestions his recent personal encounters with infected persons mean he is infected, Trump used the occasion to trail-balloon an epitaph: “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”
Trump announced that Google is “helping to develop a website … to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location.” His administration is working on it not just “strongly,” but “very strongly.” Trump told reporters Google has “1,700 engineers working on this right now. They’ve made tremendous progress.”
Google knows nothing about it, The Verge reported it first. Wired followed up:
A source at Google tells WIRED that company leadership was surprised that Trump announced anything about the initiative at the press conference. What he did say was also almost entirely wrong. There will be a coronavirus testing site, not from Google but from Alphabet sister company Verily. “We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing,” Google tweeted in a statement. “Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time.”
So, no.
Retailers, Trump said, will graciously offer sections of their parking lots for setting up drive-through virus testing. For “consumers,” Seth Maxon emphasizes at Slate. By Friday, several U.S. cities in cooperation with state and local healthcare providers had beaten retailers to establishing such stations, Business Insider reported.
Trump promised his partnership with the private sector would “vastly increase and accelerate our capacity to test for the coronavirus.” (That would be the government’s capacity he gutted nearly two years ago.) He then urged people not to get tested “if we feel that they shouldn’t be doing it.”
At a congressional hearing earlier in the week, Rep. Andy Harris, a Republican M.D., questioned Trump’s director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, about how a Democratic proposal to lower drug costs for people on Medicare might stifle private-sector “innovation.” Harris asked could Quest and LabCorp, given the miraculous power of a profit motive, have geared up to test for the coronavirus quicker than the government?
Alex Pareene continues at New Republic:
“As a clinician like yourself,” Redfield said in his answer, “I guess I anticipated that the private sector would have engaged and helped develop it for the clinical side.” He finished his response with more bewilderment: “I can tell you, having lived through the last eight weeks, I would have loved the private sector to be fully engaged eight weeks ago.”
Here were two men wondering aloud why reality had failed to conform to their ideology. Where was the private sector, exactly, during these eight weeks? How odd that these companies, whose only responsibility is to their shareholders, had failed to make up for the incompetence of this administration.
Odd, indeed. Trump told the press that under federal emergency authorities, the F.D.A. had approved a new test for the virus. “We therefore expect up to half a million additional tests will be available early next week,” Trump said.
Perhaps the acting president was taking credit for the half million testing kits and 1 million masks Chinese billionaire Jack Ma announced earlier Friday his charitable foundations would be delivering to the U.S. for free.
Taking credit for others’ successes and denying responsibility for his own failures are two of three things Americans can count on from Donald Trump. Scapegoating others for their misfortunes is a third.
As of this morning, it appears Trump will sign off on a bill “hammered out by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin” and passed through the House to “expand access to free testing, provide $1 billion in food aid and extend sick leave benefits to vulnerable Americans.”
Leave it to a woman.
Update: Got CDC director Redford’s name scrambled with questioner Harris. Fixed. (h/t RP)
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