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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1216336)

4/3/2020 1:03:59 PM

From: Brumar89

1 Recommendation

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rdkflorida2

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1582737

TrumpAmerica is no longer a superpower.

The Coronavirus Is the World’s Only Superpower

Trump’s America? Not so much.

............ When you are done being angry about all the crazy, nasty, inconsistent, and untrue things that Donald Trump says each day about the coronavirus and other matters, remember that the flood of words is cover for an Administration that in some ways barely exists relative to its predecessors, especially when it comes to crucial areas of domestic, economic, and international security—or even straightforward crisis management. Turnover at the upper levels of Trump’s White House stands at eighty-three per cent, according to a Brookings Institution tracker. In his Cabinet, Trump has had far more turnover than Presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and both George Bushes. The capacity of the federal government to respond to this catastrophe—even if Trump had been so inclined—has never been weaker. The virus was not of Trump’s making, but his government’s incoherent, disorganized response to it was utterly predictable.

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Trump forced out Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security—a massive agency, created after the 9/11 attacks, to respond to major domestic crises, such as the current pandemic—a full year ago. Not only has he yet to nominate a replacement, there is no longer even any talk that he will do so. In addition to its lack of a new Secretary, the department currently has no permanent Deputy Secretary, chief of staff, executive secretary, or undersecretary for management. At the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which falls under D.H.S.’s purview, there is no permanent deputy administrator, which is also the case at the Transportation Security Administration. The Times reported the other day that, out of seventy-five top positions in the department, twenty are either vacant or filled by acting officials.

This is the case across the government. Amid the pandemic upending the world, Trump has no Senate-confirmed director of National Intelligence, having pushed aside both the director and the subsequent acting director for perceived disloyalty. After the captain of an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, sent a memo pleading for relief for the hundreds of sailors facing a spreading covid-19 outbreak on his ship, he was relieved of his command by the acting secretary of the Navy. The previous Navy secretary had been pushed out by Trump in November, after he objected when the President intervened in a war-crimes case involving a Navy seal and two other service members. Elsewhere at the Pentagon, the undersecretary in charge of policy planning for the military was recently fired, with no replacement in sight—a key vacancy at a moment when the global health crisis seems to suggest an urgent rethinking of America’s entire national-security strategy.

As far as the White House staff, much has already been made of Trump’s downgrading of the pandemic-response team at the National Security Council. But even where positions are filled, as in many of the top government jobs related to health, the problem is not so much endemic vacancy but “feebleness, cluelessness, disempowerment,” as Stephen Morrison, the head of global health programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, put it to me.

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By this past Wednesday, China and Russia were sending planeloads of medical aid to a United States beset by crisis, a P.R. coup for America’s adversaries that Trump told reporters he welcomed.

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newyorker.com