Virus tests qualities Trump does not appear to possess

The U.S. electorate may well learn this lesson the hard way: It’s imperative to elect an adult into the White House.

Better still would be a president with moral principles, courage, vision and humility. But at the moment we’re sorely lacking a leader with even the minimum qualities of a functional adult.

Short of a major war, it would be difficult to fathom an event that would test a nation quite like the outbreak of a pandemic. And the United States, along with the rest of the world, is anxiously awaiting that possibility as COVID-19, the disease caused by a member of the coronavirus family related to the SARS and MERS viruses, spreads across the world.

What will happen when President Trump needs to be the person he so obviously is not — a leader able to calm the fears of a diverse public, to convey the problem accurately and guide a divided nation and the world through a crisis?

Trump has already punted major responsibilities to Vice President Mike Pence. Pence will lead the White House efforts, heading up a task force. Great. Trump’s point person is a man whose relationship with scientific fact as applied to health is questionable at best.

Ask the residents of Indiana. As governor, Pence’s rigid anti-drug attitude allowed HIV to spread and people to die by overdose rather than quickly moving to allow for a wide range of needle-exchange programs. Under Pence, ideology won out over the public’s health.

To fight the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate its effects, the U.S. will need nimble thinking, cooperative politics and the ability to shift rapidly, even against longstanding attitudes about public policy.

Clearly, our politics are not leveraged in that direction. Especially not during a presidential election year.

Some Democrats have blamed Trump for slow efforts to address the coronavirus due to budget cuts to the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. That’s false, according to reporting by the Associated Press. Congress never approved the Trump administration’s plans to slash funding to the CDC — an example of having adults in the room.

But the U.S. is on the defensive. We are operating in a reactive mode. And health experts are warning that more trouble could arise due to cuts in emergency preparedness grants meant for individual states and cities.

Also, testing was delayed in diagnosing a California patient because that person didn’t meet federal guidelines of who should be tested. That patient, at this writing, is feared to be the first identified U.S. case of the virus spreading in the community, as opposed to having been contracted overseas. Such transmissions could become the catalyst for people fearing the very air they breathe.

Readiness at this point will be about adaptability, cooperation and, yes, honest messaging from top political leadership.

Trump is and rightly alarmed at the wild fluctuations in the stock market. Global supply chains have already been disrupted.

What’s unclear is whether Trump thoroughly grasps how dependent U.S. and international drug manufacturers are to base products manufactured in China, where outbreaks have closed factories. Or is he mostly just worried about how the virus, if not controlled, will affect his chances at re-election?

To lead the U.S. through this dangerous time, Trump will need to pull off a tremendous feat. He will need to become the exact opposite of who he has shown himself to be.