Slightly better late than never FAILURE OF EMPATHY AND HUMANITY
Finally, President Trump seems to get it. The coronavirus is real. It is a serious threat. It is going to kill many Americans. And it can’t be wished away.
Should the president be praised for coming to this realization in late March, a month or two behind most informed Americans?
I understand that you’re not supposed to criticize the president in a time of crisis, especially a “wartime president,” as he likes to call himself. Rally around the flag and all. Doesn’t the president deserve the grace that generous Americans offer our leaders for doing their best under trying circumstances? Can’t we just move forward?
I don’t think so. Other government leaders and public health experts saw this crisis before the president and urged him to act, but the same failures of leadership and character that have distinguished his approach toward the presidency in his first three years were clearly on display in the current crisis. There is no reason to believe that he would deal with a new crisis we might face tomorrow (e.g., an earthquake in California) any better than he managed the coronavirus.
Granted, the virus was an unforeseen event, but much of its damage could have been prevented. Trump failed to act quickly and decisively. As a result, more Americans will be infected and die than would have otherwise. We are now hopeful — hopeful for only 60,000 American deaths.
I am skeptical that the president’s change of tone in the last days of March represented a true epiphany. Where was the president’s acknowledgment of early mistakes? There was none and the president continued to try to rewrite history, his frequent go-to when the facts can no longer tolerate his spinning. Why did his story change? The rising rates of infection and deaths were the breaking point. Finally, hard objective truths shut down his appeal to alternative facts. It became clear, even to the president, that his gut feelings and fabrications weren’t enough to slow the spread of the virus or revive the dead.
Four major failures of leadership and character have put us behind the inevitable and heartbreaking wave of infections and death, and have left us playing catch
up.
POLITICIZING AND SOWING DIVISION
The president has failed to put country before party, self and his own reelection concerns. In January, he suggested the media and Democrats were overhyping a “new hoax.” His daily press conferences, where he delivers muddled, sometimes deceptive messages designed to rally the base, look more like campaign events than information sessions. His fawning political appointees are careful to heap obsequious praise upon the dear leader, leaving his public health experts to mop up his messes of misinformation. Even the title of the mailer we all received from the CDC on social distancing reeked of narcissism and faux heroism: “President Trump’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America.”
Despite bipartisan effort and compromise to get a stimulus package for the American people passed, Trump took credit for the $2 trillion deal, praising his Republican colleagues, while criticizing Democrats and not even inviting Dem leaders to the signing. In addition, we’ve learned through this crisis that the president believes governors, like “that woman” Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan, must be “appreciative” of the administration’s efforts to receive assistance from the federal government.
There were so many times during this crisis when the president showed a lack of concern, even disdain for his fellow Americans. Remember when he smirked after learning that Sen. Mitt Romney was forced to self-quarantine? Or when he compared coronavirus to the flu, suggesting we shouldn’t be so concerned about a virus that might kill less than the 37,000 or 50,000 Americans per year that he cited. Then he suggested lifting social distancing restrictions and filling churches for Easter, which would have further spread infection. But March 22 may have marked the apex of heartlessness, when he showed less concern for American lives than the effect of stay-at-home orders on the shrinking economy and said, “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
FAILURE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
The president is famous for blaming others for his problems. Time and again, he has proclaimed that nobody could have foreseen a pandemic like this coronavirus. But seven days prior to his inauguration, Obama’s team briefed Trump’s team on the very real possibility of such a pandemic. In 2019, the President Trump’s own team war-gamed a pandemic flu eerily like the coronavirus and concluded that the nation was not prepared with enough masks and ventilators or for the chaos that might ensue if social distancing measures were imposed. The President reports that China’s failure to acknowledge the virus slowed the US response. But U.S. intelligence, which knew of the threat in November, briefed the president on the threat in early January, at the latest, and China acknowledged the virus in Wuhan on Jan. 7.
Another favorite excuse is “other administrations left us unprepared” and “we inherited a broken system.” But it was President Trump who gutted pandemic preparedness by cutting the CDC pandemic control teams in 39 countries, including China. He was also the one who eliminated the pandemic unit of the National Security Council. And if he thought the pandemic preparedness system was broken, he had three years in office to fix it before the virus struck.
Recently, the president and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell created the most creative blame-shifting explanation yet: The president was slow to respond to the crisis because he and his aides were preoccupied with impeachment proceedings. Of course, it was the Democrats’ fault.
IGNORANCE AND INCOMPETENCE
The president’s purveying misinformation about the coronavirus and his dithering in addressing it meant the U.S. got a late start on the problem. This will likely cost lives. It wasn’t long ago that he was downplaying the coronavirus, calling it a hoax and comparing it to the flu. Remember in February when he said the virus was “under control” and that cases “would go down, not up”? Early plunges in the stock market were directly attributable to stupid comments or tweets that demonstrated the president was out of his depth, which encouraged panic and uncertainty. The president frequently contradicted his own public health officials, failing to appreciate the superiority of science, appropriate training and expert credentials over his own preferences and gut feelings. Remember when he spoke of vaccines being available for widespread distribution within months and said “why not” to untested drugs? Paging Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx — clean-up on Air Force One.
While governors and mayors scrambled to get the ventilators, PPEs, masks, hospital beds and crucial coronavirus tests they needed, the president ignored their pleas for federal support and leadership. In many ways and settings, the president repeated the lie that was clear to anyone on the ground; “Anyone who needs a test gets a test. They’re there. They have the tests and the tests are beautiful.” The tests were not there, and they are still not there. There is nothing beautiful about it.
For weeks, leaders around the country urged the president to invoke the Defense Protection Act which would allow him to order companies to make products that are in short supply and are necessary for the fight against the pandemic. He finally invoked the power on March 18 then did nothing with it for about a week, despite shortages of ventilators, PPEs and masks.
On March 25, he used the DPA to compel General Motors to build ventilators at a pace that will be too slow to help in the near term. Instead, the president encouraged governors to locate and purchase supplies on their own, with little help from the federal government. This led to higher prices and unnecessary competition among the states, and between FEMA and the states, for scarce supplies. When urged to take control over the chaotic supply chain for necessary life-saving equipment, Trump replied “we’re not a shipping clerk” and that the federal government was only a “backstop.” In the days and weeks ahead, we will see the effect of the president’s unwillingness to be proactive and take a leadership role in coordinating the efforts of the states as we face the apex of the pandemic.
In all four failures of leadership, there was the common failure of transparency and trust, including willful lying.
Americans are strong and resilient. We will get through this together and we owe our gratitude to strong governors like Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom and Larry Hogan, other local leaders and mayors, first responders, grocery store employees and heroic health care personnel. Most of us are doing our best under trying circumstances. We are trying to be patient, realizing the economy will rebound slowly, but only after the health threat recedes.
Despite his recent change in tone, the president continues to lie and vilify the press when they ask for accountability. He so obviously wants to look competent for the campaign, but it is all theatre. He will try again to rewrite history and take credit for getting us through this crisis. But the truth is that we will get through this crisis despite the president, not because of him.