Trump’s choice on virus: Be political or be presidential

This is what happens when an incompetent president faces a crisis.

President Trump has done almost everything wrong since news of the coronavirus broke in early January. But the actions that caused the administration’s bumbling response to the COVID-19 virus have been building up for three years.

Three months after taking office, Trump had not filled key public health positions. He had not named a director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He had ended Obama-era efforts to monitor disease outbreaks.

From there, Trump chose denial and ignorance over science, especially on global warming. In addition, Environmental Protection Agency administrators told scientists to change their findings that wetlands protection benefited the economy and to underplay the danger to wetlands from toxic chemicals.

Proclaiming “America First,” Trump alienated allies, especially those in Europe. He taunted democratically elected leaders and got chummy with dictators.

Trump turned White House press briefings into cheap political theater for an audience of one. Early last year, the briefings stopped, though Trump continued to call traditional media “the enemy of the people.”

This is where those bad decisions left Trump last Wednesday when he held his first coronavirus briefing.

According to information the Washington Post obtained from the Office of Personnel Management, roughly 1,600 scientists have left the administration. That’s a 1.5 percent decrease, compared with an 8 percent increase during the Obama administration.

Yet Trump, who once called himself a vaccine skeptic, now needs credible scientists to help contain the coronavirus and tell the public how to prepare.

He needs real reporters — not right-wing propagandists — to dispense credible information. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump and is another climate change denier, dismissed the coronavirus as “the common cold.”

And to stabilize the economy until the crisis ends, Trump needs those allies he has mocked. Financial markets dropped Tuesday on the lack of a coordinated plan from Western nations.

Meanwhile, Trump was demanding that the Federal Reserve cut interest rates more and that Congress cut the payroll tax. Help for affected industries would do more good than lower interest rates. A tax cut wouldn’t help someone who lost a job.

Crises quickly strip the pretense off mismanaged organizations. So it has been with the Trump White House.

Last week, Trump needed to say three things: Public health agencies will get all the resources they need from Washington; The White House will put out all the information about the virus that we have; We will take every step to minimize economic damage.

Instead, the president congratulated himself and blasted Democrats. He made Vice President Pence the fall guy. He rambled, saying of a widespread outbreak in the United States, “There is a chance it could get worse. There is a chance it could get fairly, substantially worse. Nothing is inevitable.”

He followed that up on Monday by appearing clueless about a coronavirus vaccine. Meeting with pharmaceutical executives, Trump didn’t understand the difference between a vaccine being ready for testing and a vaccine ready for use.

Trump wanted to hear that the vaccine would be ready by summer. CDC Director Anthony Fauci and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar repeatedly had to explain that it would be more like 18 months.

Among those panicked by the virus is Trump, who is campaigning as the turnaround artist who boosted the stock market. So he tries to minimize the virus threat and blame someone for last week’s record market drop.

Round up the usual suspects. At a rally in South Carolina on Friday, Trump called the outbreak the Democrats’ “new hoax,” which the media are spreading. For good measure, Donald Trump, Jr., claimed that Democrats want “millions” to die.

In 2017, a former George W. Bush administration health official noted Trump’s inattention to the issue. He predicted that a global health crisis would go from “being on no one’s to-do list to being the only thing on their list.”

Ironically, if Trump threw away his usual script, he would impress skeptics without alienating the diehards. But that would require Trump to admit that he was wrong, and his denial extends to more than science. That’s a virus for which there is no cure.