The pandemic has revealed Trump as he is
WASHINGTON -- On Election Day 2020, it is probable that more than 60,000 Americans will be newly infected with the novel coronavirus, in a pandemic that has taken nearly a quarter of a million U.S. lives and has never been fully under control.
This is the main context for the presidential election. Anyone who wants to make an informed choice should have an informed view of this matter. I count at least three errors made by the Trump administration that have determined the shape of the pandemic in the United States.
The first is a sin of omission -the failure to act when clear duties arise.
In early February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a test for the virus that was contaminated and initially useless. This type of challenge is to be expected in the early response to a complex national challenge. Successful leadership adapts quickly and shifts course. But when testing faltered, the Trump administration did not rise to the moment, even though there were solutions at hand -employing the effective World Health Organization test, or allowing labs to develop and use their own.
“The CDC did not fare well at the beginning,” an administration official told me. But there was no quick, higher-level intervention. “Central federal authorities did not want to take responsibility for making it right.”
The second error was a sin of commission -- the direct betrayal of a duty.
Even as events rushed forward, the Trump administration actively and deceptively played down the extent and seriousness of the crisis.
This made little sense as a political strategy. But there was something else at work here -- an attribute of President Donald Trump himself. No president has more enthusiastically blamed the messenger. One of the things we value in a leader, a senior administration official told me, is that “he gives people around him permission to give bad news.” With Trump, there is “punishment for delivering bad news.”
This creates a bubble of happy talk around the president. “It is sort of like being in an alternate reality,” another administration official told me .“The numbers would tell us that 15 cities were on fire, and two were turning things around. The entire focus was on the two doing good. No focus on the 15 doing poorly.”
How do you successfully manage an unfolding crisis if you refuse to hear bad news? You don’t.
The third major error was the Trump administration’s early decision to shift burdens and blame to the states.
By the end of April, the administration hoped to declare victory and be done with it. Trump senior adviser Jared Kushner pronounced the administration’s covid-19 effort a “great success story .” On May
11, Trump said: “We have met the moment and we have prevailed.”
The official hand off involved creating federal guidelines for the safe and careful reopening of states that had closed to fight the pandemic. Trump agreed to the CDC guidelines in an Oval Office meeting on April 15, and they were announced on April 16. “If they had been adopted universally,” a senior administration figure told me, “it would have saved tens of thousands of lives.”
The unofficial hand off came on April 17, when Trump tweeted calls to “LIBERATE” Michigan, Virginia and Minnesota. It was, according to one administration official, “the most profound shock of all.” Trump had cast his lot with the shutdown’s populist critics, some of them armed.
Blaming the states provided Trump with a convenient excuse not to have his own comprehensive national plan. And sabotaging the reopening standards -which were quickly and broadly discarded -- had the rebounding influence of politicizing public health itself. In a highly polarized environment, reckless behavior became viewed as patriotism. In a crisis requiring behavior change on a vast scale -- wearing masks, social distancing -
Trump consistently treated behavioral change as a sign of weakness. “It was increasingly destructive,” I was told by a senior administration official .“It led to thousands of deaths.”
As we move toward the election, Trump is again insisting we are turning the corner on covid19. One administration official said to me: “We are turning the corner -- into a dark alley.” We start from a shockingly high level of new infections. Coming are holiday travel and increasing time spent indoors in winter. On Election Day 2020, America will be in another precarious place.
The covid-19 crisis did not have a single cause. But it has revealed Trump as he is. His leadership skills are nonexistent. He is not talented, effective or even particularly cunning. He is simply outmatched and eager to shift the blame. In the past eight months, the United States has led the world in deaths from covid-19. Trump has led the world in the production of alibis. His failures of wisdom and judgment have imposed massive, tragic costs on our country. And justice will be served if they cost him reelection.