OH HELP ME, PLEASE DOCTOR, I'M DAMAGED

Barring a miracle, Donald Trump will be president for at least nine more months, so it may be premature to call something his worst failure in office.  But his bungling of America’s COVID-19 response will be hard to top.

Trump and his defenders have settled on three fairly transparent counterattacks:  mount straw man arguments to keep critics off balance, move the  goalposts, and blame your opponents for everything that goes wrong. 

The principal straw man arguments I’ve seen are these. 

1.      Trump started the virus.  No serious person makes this claim.  Everyone knows that the virus originated in China. 

2.      The press refuses to criticize China for its handling of the initial outbreak.  No serious person denies that Chinese authorities did their best to cover up the initial outbreak, and no one insists that the data released by the Chinese is trustworthy.  Except for Donald Trump (not that he’s a serious person).  He was warned – repeatedly – that something was seriously wrong, but he chose to ignore his briefings and trust President Xi.

3.      A better president could have kept the virus out of the US.  No serious person believes that, once the virus spread outside of Wuhan, it would have been possible to keep it out of the United States.  The only one who made those sorts of claims was Trump himself, who boasted that the caseload would be down to zero in a matter of days.

We were almost totally unprepared for the pandemic on January 20, 2020, the date of the first known COVID-19 case in the United States.  If someone makes that point on social media, a swarm of Maga trolls descend, asking quite literally, OK if you’re so smart, what would you have done?  Here is my answer – a dozen things a smart president would have done differently to fight the pandemic.

A smart president would:

1.      Anticipate the crisis before it happens.  Trump failed to do that.  Worse, he ignored pandemic response plans that his predecessors had prepared for him. Then he ignored briefings from his own people. 

2.      Assemble a team of experts.  Trump failed to do that.  He appointed cronies, grifters, and Jared Kushner, who’s in a class by himself.

3.      Listen to the experts and follow their advice.  Trump failed to do that.  Instead, he listened to Fox News.  And Jared Kushner, who’s in a class by himself.

Trump essentially ignored the crisis for months.  When he thought about it at all, his concern was how it would impact his re-election chances.  He was criminally negligent, and we lost the chance to minimize our losses.  Here are some specific flaws in Trump’s pandemic responses since then.

4.      His so-called “travel ban” against China not only came too late; it was also ineffective.  It was ineffective because the ban only applied to Chinese nationals, and then only to Chinese nationals arriving in the U.S. on flights originating in China.  Chinese nationals who transited through another country weren’t affected.  Nor were Americans and foreign nationals coming from China. 

5.      He can’t make up his mind about China.  One day, he’s had a beautiful conversation with his dear friend President Xi, who’s working very, very hard on the problem.  The next day, he rages against the “Chinese virus,” and claims that China is lying to him.

6.      He never prioritized testing for the virus, which is essential information in fighting it.  Our per capita testing is shockingly lower than that of countries who’ve been fighting the virus effectively.

7.      He has the authority to order private companies to produce needed pandemic supplies, and he refuses to do it.

8.      His constant need to be the center of attention has turned the daily information briefings into a sideshow.  He toggles between insulting the press, bragging about his medical knowledge, and introducing misinformation into the public sphere.  He contradicts his own medical experts, even though he doesn’t know the difference between germs, bacteria, and viruses.  He thinks COVID-19 is smart.  (And compared to him, it sure is.)

9.      He’s bungled the federal government’s role in emergency management so badly that – even a month after he finally conceded that there was a serious problem – no one has a reliable inventory of critical supplies.  He has forced states to bid against each other because of these shortages.

10.   He’s politicized the pandemic response, treating known stockpiles of emergency equipment as his personal property, favoring Republican states and insisting on fawning praise as the price for responding to legitimate requests.

11.   He accepts no responsibility for the progress of the virus in the United States.  Instead, he blames everyone else.  Blame the Chinese, Obama, governors, Democrats, or the press.  Or blame all of them – a scapegoat for every occasion.

12.   Since the only thing he really cares about is his own reputation, he keeps moving the goalposts on what constitutes success.  If we get through this with fewer than 200,000 deaths – avoidable deaths – Trump will claim he did a great job.

And now the Very Stable Genius is working on his next act: Make America Open Again, or something like that.  He’s appointed a “Council to Re-Open America,” and it has plenty of star power.  Jared Kushner is in a class by himself, so his presence on the Council is de rigueur.  And no one knows more about economics and medicine than Ivanka.  She didn’t exactly write the book, but she knows how to Google!  The other members of the Council are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. 

Meanwhile, the God-Emperor himself has asserted that "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total."

Oh really?  Did President Obama have the authority to ignore the 2nd amendment and confiscate everybody’s arsenal?  I wonder why he didn’t do that.  Would President Biden have total authority, after he’s sworn in next year, to have Donald Trump arrested and dragged out of Mar A Lago in chains?  Maybe there’s something to this total authority thing after all.

But if Donald Trump has total authority, I wonder why he doesn’t use it more effectively.  Instead of working to solve the COVID-19 problem (and just shutting up and getting out of the way would work wonders), he put his energy into making excuses. 

There was a time when he knew better.  Or pretended to.  On November 8, 2013, he tweeted, “Leadership: Whatever happens, you’re responsible.  If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.”