Trump and the Biggest Blunder in Presidential History

We will probably never know with certainty who finally got Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, that America is facing a crisis like none before.  Whoever that individual is or individuals are, we owe them a debt of gratitude.  That said, as a column in the Washington Post lays out, the reality that Trump squandered weeks during which America could have worked to get ahead of the curve on suppressing the spread of the coronavirus which is paralyzing the nation and much of the globe.  Sadly, Trump only acts out of self-interest - his supporters who think he cares a rats' ass about them are simply delusional. Only now during the last three days has Trump admitted the virus is an titanic threat and only after many governors took action to fill the void at the federal level.  Imagine if this level of concern had been focused on the virus threat a month or more ago  instead of Trump and his Fox News sycophants calling it a hoax.  Here are highlights from the Post column:

President Trump, as he often does when he has made a mistake or revealed his ignorance, changed course to claim that he knew all along that we were facing a pandemic.

As a preliminary matter, this is a lie, as this video shows: . . . .“Trump didn't cause the pandemic. What he did was squander America's only advantage—a lag time during which to prepare for the crisis—thus encouraging the spread of the disease when it might have been contained. He has, in real and material ways, made this crisis worse.”

[Trump] the president has consistently downplayed, denied and misled the public about the seriousness of the threat. Moreover, since the first cases appeared in China in late December, he took few steps to prepare the country for the pandemic before it inevitably reached our shores. We are to believe that he knew there was a pandemic but willfully allowed the crisis to get worse.

There are two possibilities here. The first is that he was ignorant, buying into the Fox News disinformation loop. (Disclaimer: I am an MSNBC contributor.) The second is that he was thinking of his election — which he thinks is tied to the economy — so he refused to take action that would have spooked stock markets. (It’s not logical because the pandemic would eventually hit, but it would be emblematic of Trump’s short-term thinking.)

[W]hat is inescapable is that had the president not frittered away valuable time that could have been spent deploying tests (which could have been obtained from the World Health Organization), building up medical equipment and facilities and preparing for a series of escalating steps to promote social distancing, he might have reduced the strain on our health-care system and saved lives.

This is the biggest blunder in presidential history. Former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem writes for the Atlantic: “With little guidance from the federal government, governors — along with mayors, CEOs, university presidents, and leaders in the sports and entertainment businesses — have taken it upon themselves to try to slow the spread of the virus before it overwhelms the medical system’s capacity to respond.” . . . . In essence, Trump’s delinquency has turned the governors into rivals for scarce resources.

Trump did not show any real recognition of the magnitude of the problem until his administration got hold of a study from Britain. “The Imperial College London group reported that if nothing was done by governments and individuals and the pandemic remained uncontrolled, 510,000 would die in Britain and 2.2 million in the United States over the course of the outbreak,”

We have lost the window of opportunity that Singapore had, for example, to enact severe measures to test and quarantine infected persons. . . . It is not clear whether we were capable of undertaking the swift measures Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong took; but had we begun any efforts at suppressing the virus, the task of now mitigating its damage likely would have been made more manageable.

Trump shares the blame for failing to develop an infrastructure to fight pandemics (and removing structures put in place by the Obama administration). But, to borrow a phrase, “he alone” made the crisis infinitely worse by doing nothing for so long when leaders around the world were responding forcefully.