The problem for Trump isn’t just that he dropped the ball in the beginning. The problem for Trump is that he’s never picked it up. He continues to screw this up every single day, largely because he doesn’t understand what’s happening and listens to the wrong people. But he’s also creating all kinds of competing power centers, none of which know what the others are doing, and enlisting people to carry out projects that are il-though out and counter-productive.
The only reason anything is improving anywhere is because of the governors and local leaders and the average Americans who are doing the smart thing and staying away from other people.
This report from NPR tells the tale:
One month ago today, President Trump declared a national emergency.
In a Rose Garden address, flanked by leaders from giant retailers and medical testing companies, he promised a mobilization of public and private resources to attack the coronavirus.
“We’ve been working very hard on this. We’ve made tremendous progress,” Trump said. “When you compare what we’ve done to other areas of the world, it’s pretty incredible.”
But few of the promises made that day have come to pass.
NPR’s Investigations Team dug into each of the claims made from the podium that day. And rather than a sweeping national campaign of screening, drive-through sample collection and lab testing, it found a smattering of small pilot projects and aborted efforts.
In some cases, no action was taken at all.
Target did not formally partner with the federal government, for example.
And a lauded Google project turned out not to be led by Google at all, and then once launched was limited to a smattering of counties in California.
The remarks in the Rose Garden highlighted the Trump administration’s strategic approach: a preference for public-private partnerships. But as the White House defined what those private companies were going to do, in many cases it promised more than they could pull off.
“What became clear in the days and weeks or even in some cases the hours following that event was that they had significantly over-promised what the private sector was ready to do,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development.
Read on for the details. The whole thing was a bust and I mean all of it.
[Public health expert] Jeremy Konyndyk said it was an indication that the public-private partnerships the president touted on March 13 were a one-way street.
“What you want to have is a constructive partnership between the federal government and the private sector. Instead, what we see, I think, is a game of ‘not it,’ ” said Konyndyk, who served in the Obama administration at USAID, leading the government response to international disasters.
Although the federal government needs the help of the private sector, the federal government has only limited power over those companies. So to make things work, there needs to be close cooperation and advanced negotiation before announcing what companies will do, and that didn’t happen, Konyndyk said.
There is more testing than there was a month ago, but that’s about it. And there is still not enough.
This is, as I’ve said, the real problem. Trump cannot learn. He does not believe he needs to learn:
He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”
Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.’ ”
He believes he is a god and whatever he decides is automatically right because he is the one who is making it.
Aaaand:
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