If Trump weren’t such an ignorant egomaniac he would have recognized that despite surviving impeachment with a party line vote, he was in trouble for re-election and he would have seized on the pandemic as a chance to reinvent himself as a “wartime” style president and get the country to rally around him in time to boost his ratings and get him a second term. Presidents who successfully deal with crises are usually rewarded for it if their timing is right and his would have been.
But he is a fool who thought he was coasting to an easy victory and saw the pandemic as an impediment rather than a chance to prove his leadership so he decided to try to micromanage it with delusional cheerleading and magical thinking. And in the process proved himself to be an even worse president than we thought.
The only thing keeping him even in the running are the cynical opportunists in the GOP establishment and the right wing media that want to milk every penny from the crass, hateful mob that loves him for his monstrous personality.
This story in the Daily Beast wraps up the story of the administration’s epic pandemic failure:
President Donald Trump’s prospects for re-election likely rest on convincing voters that he has succeeded in containing the spread of COVID-19 even as the virus ravages the country and creeps back into communities.
It’s a remarkable gambit: Tell the public not to believe the carnage playing out before them. And it’s one made even harder by recent events. Over the past week more than 500,000 Americans tested positive for COVID-19, more than 230,000 have died during the pandemic, and 47,000 are hospitalized because of complications from their infection.about:
It didn’t have to be this way, both for the president and the country.
While COVID-19 surprised the world with the speed at which it reproduced itself and infected others, top health officials—both current and former—concede that Trump and some of his advisers made critical mistakes along the way that not only allowed the virus to spread uncontrollably, but also put Trump in the precarious political position in which he now finds himself.
Officials say that while there were several unknowns about the virus in the first days of the worldwide outbreak, Trump and the White House did, in fact, understand the risk it posed to Americans. They just hid it from the public. Although there were plenty of warnings from national-security and health officials, the White House didn’t move fast enough to respond to a virus that had already forced Italy into a full lockdown. Trump was too slow in shutting down flights from China and Europe, too slow to ramp up testing, too slow to move the country into lockdown, and too slow to invoke the Defense Production Act to supply hospitals with medical supplies and personal protective equipment, those same officials said.
“The administration thought it reacted early to blocking travel from China in the early days but it was almost too late. The virus was already here. That was the biggest mistake—not moving quickly enough. The breaking point was really that early,” said one senior health official. “We went from a full-on defense to an ‘It’s here, what do we do?’ mentality.’ We haven’t been able to reverse course since then.”
But the most severe misstep didn’t have anything to do with making swift national-security decisions, officials say. The virus was able to plow through communities in large part because, from the outset, the White House tried to handle the federal government’s response on its own, cutting out essential input from doctors and scientists and other top officials who had experience handling major natural disasters. Normally, officials said, the White House allows health agencies or other branches of government—including the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Administration—to take the lead in handling the response to national emergencies. In those situations, the president is briefed and offers counsel but does not dictate how they are handled in absolute terms. That wasn’t the case for Trump and COVID-19.
“The White House took over operations, which it never should do. The task force should have always been the policy-making entity, driving policy demands down to the agencies which have the expertise to execute that,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security. “The White House doesn’t have the bandwidth. We didn’t spend that time either determining what assets we had, resupplying the stockpile and guiding manufacturing.”
One senior official described the mistake more succinctly. It was, the official said, “arrogance” thatmade the president believe that he could handle the pandemic on his own, which in turn caused major delays in the distribution of testing, personal protective equipment, and ventilators. The president and his advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, decided they would run the response like a business, that official said. And Trump was the boss.
“It’s one thing to say, policy-wise, you may bring outside-the-box thinking; it’s another thing to believe that you can execute on that in a nation as big and as vast and the pandemic being that scary,” Kayyem said. “There was no understanding of how a pandemic response works.”
While Trump delegated almost all the grunt work to others, he refused to relinquish the spotlight.He held press conferences almost daily, during which—at one point—he speculated wildly about whether injecting bleach into the body would be a good way to kill the virus. The moment became iconic for its inanity. But the ripple effects were quite serious.
“From that point on, we knew that the response to this virus was going to have to entail a large countermessaging campaign… efforts to fight back against the president’s rhetoric,” said one senior health official working with the coronavirus task force.
Officials say Trump’s frequent appearances severely hindered the administration’s ability to push out a clear message. From the beginning, Trump tried to conceal the severity of the virus from the American people. “This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Bob Woodward in a February interview, even as he explained that he didn’t want to “create panic” and so would “play it down.”
“There wasn’t the level of urgency I expected. Most people thought [Trump] didn’t understand or he wasn’t giving it an appropriate amount of attention,” said Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security for counterterrorism and threat prevention during the Trump era. “In reality, he chose to downplay it because he didn’t want to affect the economy he wanted to run on.”
Trump’s preoccupation with the public-relations elements of the pandemic response compelled him to make decisions at odds with what public-health professionals wanted.From the start, officials said, Trump pushed back on recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases specialist, and Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the task force, to press forward with recommendations to lock down certain portions of the country experiencing worrying test positivity rates and push guidelines on mask-wearing and social distancing.
“There was a basic pushback that this thing could hit us the way it did other countries,” said one senior official. “And that messaging was coming from the White House and extended outside the administration.”
He also resisted efforts to promote mask-wearing, even as it became clear that it would help significantly mitigate against the spread of the virus.
“We should have had a united front across the country on this and we would be light years ahead of where we are now—which is almost even worse than where we were at the beginning of the pandemic,” said Olivia Troye, a former senior adviser to the task force who endorsed Biden shortly after departing the Trump administration. President Trump, she added, “made a choice early on—a choice that we all continue to suffer from with our communities once again suffering, more loved ones getting sick now, and lives continuing to be lost every single day.”
Donald Trump is responsible for a major mass death event in this country because not only is he too stupid and too narcissistic to realize the seriousness of the crisis and fulfill his responsibility to the American people. He is also too stupid and narcissistic to realize that he made his own re-election prospects even harder.
There’s more at the link. And it’s really worth reviewing as we face a winter of sickness and death from the pandemic while the president is holding superspreader rallies all over the country with people chanting “Fire Fauci.” I wonder how many of them will be dead in the next few months.
It’s all just horrifying.