A nation in crisis, without a real leader

The coronavirus pandemic has raised all the worst attributes of President Trump: the terminal narcissism, the propensity to flat-out lie, the incompetence, the xenophobia. At a moment when Americans needed a president they could trust, who could soothe the jitters rising from sea to sea, they were reminded of the charlatan in the White House.

No leader on the planet has a better platform than a televised address from the Oval Office, scripted on teleprompter, to set the nation, the markets and the world at ease in the throes of crisis. Trump failed so miserably, so unsteadily, so disingenuously Wednesday night, that stock futures started diving as he spoke, and his staff had to move quickly to correct misstatements in the speech with global ramifications.

But the abysmal failure of Trump’s leadership in the face of the worst crisis of his presidency neither began nor ended with one speech in which he tried to deflect blame on “a foreign virus” that was “seeded by travelers from Europe.”

The president of the United States has been trying to hoodwink us from the start as if we were just another group of suckers being pitched on one of his properties. This time, however, the Trumpian snake oil was at a severe cost to our health, our jobs and our 401(k) balances.

On Feb. 26, Trump assured us that the number of infected Americans, then 15, is “going very substantially down, not up” — and “within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.”

Wrong. As of Friday, it was approaching 2,000, with more than 40 deaths.

On March 9, Trump tweeted that the coronavirus was no more concerning than the common flu, which kills an average of 37,000 Americans a year, compared with the 546 coronavirus cases and 22 deaths at that point. “Think about that!” he tweeted.

Yes, think about the expert opinion of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who said the coronavirus was “10 times more lethal” than seasonal flu. “Bottom line, it’s going to get worse,” Fauci told Congress on Wednesday.

Even if the president remains in denial. Especially if the president and his sycophants on Fox News and talk radio — here’s looking at you, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh — remain in conspiracy-fueled denial.

Another flat-out fabrication from Trump was his March 13 claim that “anybody who needs a test (in the U.S. can get one.” That may be true in South Korea, where 20,000 people have been tested

per day. But the process is moving at a glacial pace in this nation, where the Centers for Disease Control could count only 17,000 tests to date, as of Thursday.

Fauci, who earned his credibility with his studied and substantive leadership in the AIDS epidemic decades ago, was forthright about the nation’s slow response on testing: “It is a failing. Let’s admit it.” He made those remarks Thursday, the day Trump continued to insist that testing was “going very smoothly.” It is not, by any measurement. Trump has treated the pandemic as a political problem that can be swept away with his usual bluster. He tried denying that he once said infected Americans can get better “even going to work” — he did, indeed — as “just more fake news and disinformation by the Democrats.”

On Friday, as he declared a national emergency to combat the outbreak he once tried to downplay, Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the lag in testing. The buck always stops elsewhere with him.

Even as American society was shutting down last week — schools, concerts, sporting events, group gatherings — the president refused to offer guidance on the closures’ wisdom or genuine expressions of empathy for those who were suffering physical or financial trauma. However, he did not spare any opportunity at self-congratulation for his administration’s “unprecedented response” and “early, intense action” that prevented greater devastation.

This nation has rarely if ever been in more need of a real president, firmly grounded in reality.