Ever since Donald Trump took the oath to preserve and protect, many of us have been relieved that someone so manifestly unfit has not been confronted with a true national emergency.
Oh well.
Ask yourself whether this is the kind of person you want helming America on the cusp of a pandemic. Heck, I bet even a smattering of his cultists would be a tad nervous reading the next paragraph, which appeared deep in a disturbing story last week in The Washington Post:
“Trump grew concerned that any stronger action by his administration (against the coronavirus) would hurt the economy. He has told advisers that he does not want the administration to do or say anything that would further spook the markets. He remains worried that any large-scale outbreak could hurt his reelection bid.“
That’s our boy. He sure has his priorities.
Since pathological narcissism is his most important metric, perhaps he should be worried that screwing up the coronavirus response, by recklessly putting Americans at risk, is what could truly hurt his reelection bid. Not surprisingly, he’s off to a good start.
In fact, he laid the groundwork two years ago – when he fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management structure that was put in place by President Obama. Basically, Obama hired a “pandemic czar” to coordinate the responding federal agencies – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, Homeland Security, and the National Institutes of Health, among others. That’s how the 2014 Ebola scare was successfully contained.
So much for that. Obama had set it up, so naturally it had to go.
As a result, Trump’s subordinates have been scrambling in recent weeks to put together a coordinated response team. Granted, it’s tough to work for a dangerous incompetent whose latest budget cuts $3 billion from global health programs, cuts $3 billion from the NIH, and cuts roughly 16 percent of the money earmarked for the CDC. But hey, he’s making America great again.
The biggest problem with putting MAGA minions in charge of something as supremely important as public health is that they don’t play well with others. One episode says it all: A few senior Trump officials decided on their own to fly some infected Americans back to the States on the same plane with uninfected people – defying the advice of the CDC’s health experts. Then it turned out that Trump was furious because he’d been kept out of the loop on the decision.
Magnify that by whatever comes next.
In the absence of Obama-level competence, what we’re getting from Trump is predictably worthless. Like when he said on TV last month that “we have it totally under control…It’s going to be fine.” Like when he told his rally saps last week that the virus will be gone when the weather warms up in April (“the heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus”), a proclamation that brings to mind his belief that raking forests will stop wildfires and that nukes will stop hurricanes.
“We’re in great shape in our country,” he assured a roomful of governors last week, referring to his team’s virus response. He sounds like Baghdad Bob, the Saddam Hussein flak who kept saying all was well while American bombs were falling around him. And there’s no better evidence than what happened yesterday:
At 4:42 p.m., Trump tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA…Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” I don’t know what the buzzing bees in his head were telling him; in reality, at 4 p.m. the market closed 1000 points down.
The conservative columnist Ross Douthat writes today: “Nothing about (Trump’s) response so far instills confidence that he’s ready for the kind of crisis that Candidate Trump would have been quick to recognize and politically exploit. And the fact that Rush Limbaugh spent yesterday declaring that the coronavirus is no worse than the common cold, and that it’s ‘being weaponized’ by the press ‘to bring down Donald Trump’ – well, that doesn’t instill confidence that pressure from the right will force Trump to take the outbreak seriously.”
Are we surprised? If Trump isn’t careful, the virus could become his Katrina. Let’s hope we don’t have to pay for it with our health.