Trump failed nation in this time of crisis

The problem really isn't that President Trump's response to coronavirus has been ineffective, it's that he hasn't responded at all.

Jerry Siccardi is 100 years old. He lives in Stratford. And even at 100 years old, he decided to get together with his daughter, Judy, and start making masks.

We all have these stories from our states, just folks who started sewing masks and giving them out to people who needed them. Jerry gave them out to his neighbors, he sent some to the Bridgeport Correctional Center, he gave them to former students. And then when folks learned that Jerry was pretty good at making masks, they’d call, and he made them on order.

These are the stories that could frankly fill up the whole day from each one of our states.

And while my constituents in Connecticut, who are as generous as that, would have undertaken those actions regardless of the effectiveness of the response from their government, their actions are all the more important given the failures of their federal government to do the right thing by them.

And I want to spend a few minutes today talking about the Trump administration’s response to the crisis that we are facing.

If we’re going to be here in Washington, I think it’s important for us to talk about what is missing.

There’s been a lot of ink spent already criticizing the Trump administration’s response to the crisis, that the strategy was wrong or the focus was in the wrong place or that the level of activity wasn’t high enough, but I really think that this is the wrong paradigm. The problem really isn’t that President Trump’s response to coronavirus has been ineffective, it’s that he hasn’t responded at all.

There had been press conferences, there’s a social media presence, but they aren’t running a national response.

From the beginning, the response has been left to states, to cities, to counties, to hospitals, to school districts, to nursing homes, to shelters, to food banks, to charitable organizations, really to every public entity that isn’t the administration.

And we shouldn’t lose sight of how remarkable that is. That in the face of the most serious national crisis since 2001, perhaps since Vietnam and World War II, the administration has effectively chosen to stand down and let others lead.

At the beginning, the president didn’t do nothing. He fanned the flames. He called coronavirus, in the early days, a hoax perpetuated by his political opponents. He telegraphed to the country that this wasn’t something we needed to be prepared for because it was just going to go away. Despite all the experts telling him differently.

Now, arguably the most significant action that the Trump administration undertook, really the only action that the president mentions to this day when pressed for tangible things that he has done, was the set of travel restrictions.

But public health experts told the president that the restrictions wouldn’t work, especially since they were filled with loopholes. And we now know that 400,000 people ended up getting to the United States from the countries that were subject to the restrictions list. The travel ban was feckless. It was a failure.

And after that, the administration effectively gave up. Now, what could they have done, as the travel ban started to prove ineffective at stopping the virus and cases started to mount, what could they have done?

They could have created a national effort to ramp up domestic production of personal protective equipment. They didn’t do that.

The administration could have come up with a national testing plan. They could have done an early assessment of how many tests were going to be needed, taking control of the supply chain… They didn’t do that.

They could have begun the work of building a national public health workforce…or at least a plan to help states build that workforce. But they didn’t do that.

They could have proposed any of the various programs that Congress developed and passed: the PPP program, the state stabilization fund, the hospital relief fund, the national testing program fund. None of these were initiatives from President Trump. Early on…the president’s only idea was a payroll tax cut. It is still the president’s only idea.

When this crisis is over and life is returned to relative normal, there will be a grave, serious accounting of how badly the Trump administration failed this nation that it was sworn to protect.

I’m grateful for my colleagues stepping up time and time again in a bipartisan way to try to fill that vacuum that has been created by the failure to lead by the executive branch.

This commentary was excerpted from Sen. Chris Murphy’s May 6 remarks to the U.S. Senate. View the entire speech at youtube.com/ watch?v=cqSfkuk3fAY. Murphy is a Democrat from Connecticut.