| | | But he didn't cost us many many lives like Trump did.................
"Trump’s failures during the coronavirus pandemic run the gamut from the rhetorical to the organizational. Every time the president speaks he seems to add to the fear and chaos surrounding the situation: telling Americans it was not serious by asserting his “hunches” about data, assuring people that everyone would be tested even when there were very few tests available, telling people that we are very close to a vaccine when it is anywhere from 12 to 18 months away, mistakenly asserting that goods as well as people from Europe would be forbidden from entering the United States, and announcing that Google had a website for testing while the initiative was merely an unimplemented idea, were just a few of his televised gaffes. After every presidential statement, “clarifications” were needed. Trump has the unique distinction of giving a national address meant to calm the country that had the effect of taking the stock market down over 1,000 points.
We have come to expect verbal imprecision and outright lies from this president, but that is more easily corrected on less momentous developments. When there is fundamental incompetence on matters of tremendous importance, voters punish poor results. And this is where Trump’s actions on the coronavirus have gone far off target. One of the most glaring deficiencies of his administration has been the failure to have enough tests available to identify those infected and to screen others for possible exposure. South Korea, a country a fraction of the size of the United States, is testing thousands more people a day than the United States. The failure to produce tests quickly will go down as one of the biggest failures in the overall handling of this disease because it prevented authorities from understanding the scope of the pandemic and therefore made it difficult for them to undertake appropriate steps to mitigate its spread. Other countries had tests and now state governments are rapidly rolling out their own tests after the CDC belatedly removed regulatory barriers. Even the nation’s chief infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, has admitted that testing is a major failure—a statement that is most certainly not one of the president’s talking points.
In this and other areas, Trump has failed to learn from the failures of his predecessors. When President Ronald Reagan signed into law the fundamental restructuring of the military known as the Goldwater-Nichols reforms, [1] he did this knowing that he did not want a military fiasco on his watch like the failed Iranian rescue mission that did in Jimmy Carter’s presidency. And following the total breakdown in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, President Barack Obama made sure his FEMA director was an experienced state emergency management director. He knew that poor performance during natural disasters would doom his presidency.
During the Obama Administration, the White House dealt with a precursor of the coronavirus: the Ebola virus. While the scrambling eventually worked out thanks to decisive executive office leadership, it illustrated that pandemics were a fundamental national security threat. They created the Global Health Security Team in the National Security Council to prepare. In May of 2018, Trump disbanded the team allegedly because he never thought pandemics would happen and because “I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.” |
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