It is simply impossible to grasp how badly Trump has failed. No movie plot would be ever be green-lighted that featured such an implausibly inept national leader.
Turns out the screenwriter for Contagion, which is actually a very good movie with an excellent score by Cliff Martinez, agrees with me:
I never contemplated a federal response that was so ignorant, misguided and full of dangerous information. I thought our leaders were sworn to protect us. I don’t get to write this story this time. This is a story we are all writing together.
Are there scenes or characters you would change or adjust based on what we are seeing now with this novel coronavirus?
I would have never imagined that the movie needed a “bad guy” beyond the virus itself. It seems pretty basic that the plot should be humans united against the virus. If you were writing it now, you would have to take into account the blunders of a dishonest president and the political party that supports him. But any good studio executive would have probably told us that such a character was unbelievable and made the script more of a dark comedy than a thriller.
The entire interview is worth a read. He’s clearly appalled at Trump and not afraid to say it out loud. All of us need to.