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| William Saletan of The Slate points out how Donald Trump made the coronavirus pandemic worse for the country. |
Thank you, William Saletan and the Slate magazine for saying the thing about this coronavirus pandemic which needed to be said in the manner that cuts through the bull.
In meticulously thorough article, The Trump Pandemic, Saletan points out how Donald Trump knew the pandemic was coming, refused to get the country prepared for it, and then interfered with the fight against it every step of the way. It's a sad story of negligence which I wish more in the media would have the guts to tell instead of dancing around the subject.
When you have some time, this article is required reading :
The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.
This isn’t speculation. All the evidence is in the public record. But the truth, unlike Trump’s false narrative, is scattered in different places. It’s in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president’s stray remarks. This article puts those fragments together. It documents Trump’s interference or negligence in every stage of the government’s failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.
The article contains so many instances of ineptitude and deliberate undermining by Trump that it's almost impossible for me to choose just one excerpt which epitomizes just how badly he bungled this situation.
One item which stands out has to be how he resisted taking measures to slow down the death toll and then worked against those same measures after he was persuaded to announce them. And, according to the article, Trump only announced these measures when the stock market began to fall:
The president’s most decisive contribution to the death toll was his resistance to public health measures known as “mitigation”: social distancing, school and workplace closures, and cancellations of large gatherings. Messonnier and others had warned since early February that Americans needed to prepare for such measures. On Feb. 24, Trump’s health advisers decided it was time to act. But they couldn’t get a meeting with Trump, because he was off to India to discuss another trade deal. When he returned, he blew up at Messonnier for talking about closing schools and offices. The meeting to discuss mitigation was canceled.
Mitigation required leadership. The president needed to tell Americans that the crisis was urgent and that life had to change. Instead, he told them everything was fine. On March 2, he held another rally, this time in North Carolina. Before the rally, a TV interviewer asked him whether he was taking more precautions because of the virus. “Probably not so much,” Trump replied. “I just shook hands with a whole lot of people back there.” The next day, he said it was safe to travel across the country, since “there’s only one hot spot.” On March 5, at a Fox News town hall, he repeated, “I shake anybody’s hand now. I’m proud of it.” On March 6, visiting the CDC, he was asked about the risks of packing people together at rallies. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he said.
As schools and businesses began to close, Trump pushed back. On March 4, he dismissed a question about further closures, insisting that only “a very small number” of Americans were infected. On March 9, he tweeted that the virus had hardly killed anyone and that even in bad flu seasons, “nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.” Italy locked down its population, the NBA suspended its season, and states began to postpone elections. But through the middle of March, as advisers urged the president to endorse mitigation, he stood his ground. Finally, as the stock market continued to fall, Trump’s business friends agreed that it was time to yield. On March 16, he announced mitigation guidelines.
A week later, Saletan said, Trump was pushing to rescind the guidelines:
On March 23, a week after he announced the mitigation guidelines, Trump began pushing to rescind them. “We have to open our country,” he demanded. He batted away questions about the opinions of his medical advisers. “If it were up to the doctors, they may say, ‘Let’s keep it shut down,’ ” he shrugged. But “you can’t do that with a country, especially the No. 1 economy.” The next day, the stock market soared, and Trump took credit. Investors “see that we want to get our country open as soon as possible,” he crowed.
Trump fixated on the market and the election. In more than a dozen tweets, briefings, and interviews, he explicitly connected his chances of reelection to the speed at which schools and businesses reopened. (Trump focused on schools only after he was told that they were crucial to resuming commerce.) The longer it took, he warned, the better Democrats would do in the election. In April, he applauded states that opened early and hectored states that kept businesses closed. In June, he told workers in Maine, “You’re missing a lot of money.” “Why isn’t your governor opening up your state?” he asked them.
Trump pushed states to reopen businesses even where, under criteria laid out by his health officials, it wasn’t safe to do so. He called for “pressure” and endorsed lawsuits against governors who resisted. He issued an executive order to keep meat-processing plants open, despite thousands of infections among plant employees. He ordered the CDC to publish rules allowing churches to reopen, and he vowed to “override any governor” who kept them closed. In April, he made the CDC withdraw an indefinite ban on cruises, which had spread the virus. In July, he pressed the agency to loosen its guidelines for reopening schools.
And that's just one instance of Trump's awful leadership in fighting this pandemic contained in the article.
Anyone running that nonsense about this not being the time to point the finger of blame is full of crap. This is the perfect time to point fingers and assess blame. We have an election coming up and Trump wants us to trust him with a second term. As Saletan puts it:
“We had the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “Then we got hit with the plague from China.” But now, he promised, “We’re building it again.” In Trump’s story, the virus is a foreign intrusion, an unpleasant interlude, a stroke of bad luck. But when you stand back and look at the full extent of his role in the catastrophe, it’s amazing how lucky we were. For three years, we survived the most ruthless, reckless, dishonest president in American history. Then our luck ran out.
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