After Trump's Malfeasance, Biden Must Show He Can Do Better

Joe Biden in Philadelphia on March 10. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

With Donald Trump having failed the test of protecting America from a pandemic through both his disbanding of the national security pandemic team and slashing positions and funding for the CDC on top of his gutting of many other agencies now needed to stem the Covid-19 economic downturn, Joe Biden's mission is to make the case that he would (i) put together a first class administration with competent individuals rather than grifters and sycophants, and (ii) would better manage future threats.    A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican and Never Trumper lays out this situation while taking shots at both Trump but also those in the right and GOP who seemingly have had lobotomies or suffered from a brain deadening illness as they pander and suck up to Trump while downplaying the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Here are column excerpts:

As yet, it is a disease without a name. But the symptoms are obvious. The patient begins by playing down a gathering national disaster — say a pandemic. . . . . The patient then takes this as an opportunity to complain that the threat was exaggerated all along. . . . Success in opposing a challenge is thus interpreted as evidence the challenge never existed.

Perhaps this should be known as the Ingraham illness — as in Laura Ingraham, who recently demanded “we want answers” because the casualty count from covid-19 is lower than initially predicted. I’m more inclined to diagnose bubonic Bennettism — for William Bennett, who has likened covid-19 to the flu, grumbled about national overreaction and claimed the global outbreak “is not a pandemic.” . . . .As education secretary and as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bennett often reminded us that liberals of great learning could be guilty of destructive silliness. Now he is demonstrating that the same is true of cerebral conservatives.
 In reality, there is a series of asymmetrical threats that the United States needs to prepare against. They include terrorism and pandemic disease. They also include cyberaggression against U.S. democracy, criminal gangs of international reach, climate disruption and refugee flows that foster despair and radicalism. And there is the threat of nuclear proliferation. And the threat from an increasingly belligerent China. We need U.S. leaders who can prevent mass casualties from deadly pathogens and chew gum at the same time. In the last presidential election, Americans chose a leader who has problems even with the second half of that challenge.

President Trump only inhabits the performative present. He neither learns from the past nor anticipates the future. He values blind loyalty above foresight or expertise. He was unprepared for the coronavirus and will leave the country less prepared for every gathering threat that does not arrive on his watch.

We need U.S. leaders who won’t minimize dangers that don’t neatly fit their preconceptions. Leaders who take the world as it is, and plan for a world that could go wrong in a hundred horrible but predictable ways.

More than any other value or talent, Joe Biden must show preemptive competence on American security. I understand his current need to solidify support from his party’s left. I appreciate the appeal of his empathy and decency. But in light of the coronavirus, this is his one thing needful: to assure Americans that he and his White House team would protect the country from the full range of global dangers. Now or soon, Biden should further reveal the depth and range of his defense and foreign policy advisers, chosen from both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. (Of all the elements of the Bush administration, defense and foreign policy staffers are most likely to join a national unity team.) Biden should put them to work on a series of brilliantly boring policy addresses and white papers on emerging threats. And Biden should be actively persuading, through intermediaries, respected military and intelligence figures who served in the Trump administration to publicly support him. These endorsements could be announced to great effect around convention time, when the task turns to persuading independents and suburban Republicans. When the accretions of the presidency are removed, national security, broadly defined, is the job. Trump has made a mess of it. Biden would do better. His task is to demonstrate it.

In reality, almost anyone who bothered to listen to experts, pick appointees based on competence, not ideology of the size of campaign contributions, and educate themselves on issues and policy could do a better job than Trump.  With Biden's experience he has the ability to do far better than Trump.  He needs to package this message and begin its dissemination now.