Trump's Critical Role in Leading America to a Pandemic Catastrophe

Covid-19 is out of control in a number of states - included GOP led states that rushed to reopen at the demand of Donald Trump - and now Trump is trying to block more funds for testing and contact tracing and refuses to back a nationwide mandate that masks be worn in public settings.  Trump's reasons for blocking the funding is that in his mind more testing will show the magnitude of the pandemic and further highlight his regime's failure to properly lead in fighting the pandemic in the manner successfully used in other advanced nations. The resistance to masks seems to be part of Trump - and his knuckle dragging base's rejection of science and expertise in general.  Sadly, Trump's current conduct is more of what has played a critical role in what might have been a successfully contained pandemic to one that is now gripping much of the country and forcing a number of states to reconsider shutting down their economies.  A very long piece in the New York Times looks at Trump's role in leading much of the country to disaster.  Here are article highlights:

Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.

Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.

But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states.  . . . an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.

Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.

In doing so, he was ignoring warnings that the numbers would continue to drop only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the economy and tend to his battered re-election hopes.

A sharp pivot soon followed, with consequences that continue to plague the country today as the virus surges anew.

Even as a chorus of state officials and health experts warned that the pandemic was far from under control, Mr. Trump went, in a matter of days, from proclaiming that he alone had the authority to decide when the economy would reopen to pushing that responsibility onto the states. The government issued detailed reopening guidelines, but almost immediately, Mr. Trump began criticizing Democratic governors who did not “liberate” their states.

Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away proved wrong. But an examination of the shift in April and its aftermath shows that the approach he embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy that he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.

He and his top aides would openly disdain the scientific research into the disease and the advice of experts on how to contain it, seek to muzzle more authoritative voices like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and continue to distort reality even as it became clear that his hopes for a rapid rebound in the economy and his electoral prospects were not materializing.

Now, interviews with more than two dozen officials inside the administration and in the states, and a review of emails and documents, reveal previously unreported details about how the White House put the nation on its current course during a fateful period this spring.

·         Key elements of the administration’s strategy were formulated out of sight in Mr. Meadows’s daily meetings, by aides who for the most part had no experience with public health emergencies and were taking their cues from [Trump] the president.

·         Dr. Birx . . . failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.

·        [Trump] The president quickly came to feel trapped by his own reopening guidelines. States needed declining cases to reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests. But more testing meant overall cases were destined to go up, undercutting [Trump's] the president’s push to crank up the economy. The result was to intensify Mr. Trump’s remarkable public campaign against testing, a vivid example of how he often waged war with science and his own administration’s experts and stated policies.

·         Mr. Trump’s bizarre public statements, his refusal to wear a mask and his pressure on states to get their economies going again left governors and other state officials scrambling to deal with a leadership vacuum.

·         Not until early June did White House officials even begin to recognize that their assumptions about the course of the pandemic had proved wrong.

It was the end of March and his initial, 15-day effort to slow the spread of the virus by essentially shutting down the country was expiring in days. Sitting in front of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office were Drs. Fauci and Birx, along with other top officials. Days earlier, Mr. Trump had said he envisioned the country being “opened up and raring to go” by Easter, but now he was on the verge of announcing that he would keep the country shut down for another 30 days.

“Do you really think we need to do this?” the president asked Dr. Fauci. “Yeah, we really do need to do it,” Dr. Fauci replied, explaining again the federal government’s role in making sure the virus did not explode across the country.

But even as [Trump] the president was acknowledging the need for tough decisions, he and his aides would soon be looking to do the opposite — build a public case that the federal government had completed its job and unshackle the president from ownership of the response.

By mid-April, Mr. Trump had grown publicly impatient with the stay-at-home recommendations he had reluctantly endorsed. Weekly unemployment claims made clear the economy was cratering and polling was showing his campaign bleeding support. Republican governors were agitating to lift the lockdown and the conservative political machinery was mobilizing to oppose what it saw as constraints on individual freedom.

The wind down of the federal government’s response would play out over the next several weeks. The daily briefings with Mr. Trump ended on April 24. The Meadows team started barring Dr. Fauci from making most television appearances, lest he go off message and suggest continued high risk from the virus.

By June the president was regularly making nonsensical statements like, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

Later, it was clear that states that rushed to reopen before meeting the criteria in the guidelines — like Arizona, Texas and Alabama — would have among the worst surges in new cases.

Dr. Birx’s belief that the United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. The Italians had been almost entirely compliant with stay-at-home orders and social distancing, squelching new infections to negligible levels before the country slowly reopened. Americans, by contrast, began backing away by late April from what social distancing efforts they had been making, egged on by Mr. Trump.
The real-world consequences of Mr. Trump’s abdication of responsibility rippled across the country.

Other nations had moved aggressively to employ an array of techniques that Mr. Trump never mobilized on a federal level, including national testing strategies and contact tracing to track down and isolate people who had interacted with newly diagnosed patients.

“These things were done in Germany, in Italy, in Greece, Vietnam, in Singapore, in New Zealand and in China,” said Andy Slavitt, a former federal health care official who had been advising the White House.

“They were not secret,” he said. “Not mysterious. And these were not all wealthy countries. They just took accountability for getting it done. But we did not do that here. There was zero chance here that we would ever have been in a situation where we would be dealing with ‘embers.’ ”

By early June, it was clear that the White House had gotten it wrong. . . . . Digging into new data from Dr. Birx, they concluded the virus was in fact spreading with invisible ferocity during the weeks in May when states were opening up with Mr. Trump’s encouragement and many were all but declaring victory.

The number of new cases has now surged far higher than the previous peak of more than 36,000 a day in mid-April. On Thursday, there were more than 75,000 confirmed new cases, a record.

Mr. Trump’s disdain for testing continues to affect the country.

“When we were trying to get people to wear masks, they would point to the president and say, well, not something that we need to do,” he said.

Mr. Suarez expressed similar frustrations with Mr. Trump’s dismissive approach to mask wearing. “People follow leaders,” he said, before rephrasing his remarks. “People follow the people who are supposed to be leaders.”

Trump has thousands of avoidable deaths on his hands.

The Gathering Storm in America's South

Thankfully, over the last decade and especially since 2017 Virginia has effectively ceased to be a southern state and has embraced modernity and Democrat political control.  Thus, Virginia was the first state in the South to see a gubernatorial "stay home" order - Kentucky, North Carolina and Louisiana, also with Democrat governors followed suit.  Only much later did a few other states - e.g., Georgia and Florida - issue such orders although Florida's order exempts church gatherings from the restrictions.  Why the difference?  Simple: all the other states are "red states" with Republican governors eager to kiss Donald Trump's ass and beholden to Fox News and fearful of their knuckle dragging base.  We have yet to see the consequences of these failures to act as urged by medical experts.  A piece New York Times looks at Tennessee as a case study of the Republican failure to heed medical experts.  Note the governor's idiotic call for mayors and other local leaders to pray even as he ignored medical experts. Here are article excerpts:

NASHVILLE — On March 22, when Nashville’s mayor John Cooper closed nonessential businesses here, it was a terrible blow to companies and shops still reeling from the tornado that tore through Middle Tennessee on Super Tuesday. Small businesses struggle in the best of times, and a one-two punch like that — a natural disaster followed by a lethal pandemic — will almost certainly force some of them to close for good.

But it had to be done. Nashville’s courts and schools were already closed, but the crowds on Lower Broadway, the heart of Nashville’s tourist district, showed no sign of dissipating . . . Even after the Nashville Board of Health voted unanimously to shut the honky-tonks down, several bar owners said they would not comply unless ordered to do so by the governor of Tennessee.

Such orders have been slow in coming here, and in nearly every other state in the American South. Tennessee governor Bill Lee was slow to end the legislative session and send members of the Tennessee General Assembly home to their districts, slow to close public schools, slow to suspend church services, slow to shutter restaurants and gyms.

Many city charters in Tennessee prevent local leaders from issuing their own orders, and mayors begging for a statewide directive got none. . . . . On March 16Mr. Lee told local leaders around the state that mandates weren’t necessary to enforce social-distancing guidelines: “We’re not issuing orders, we’re issuing guidance and strong suggestions,” Mr. Lee said. “We don’t have to mandate people not do certain behavior because Tennesseans follow suggestions.”

As it turns out, they don’t. . . . where I expected to find a deserted parking lot, it was business as usual on a sunny spring Saturday. Nashville has received hundreds of reports of similar violations.

On March 30, when Mr. Lee issued an executive order shutting down nonessential businesses, he stopped short of requiring Tennesseans to stay home. “It is deeply important that we protect personal liberties,” he said, ignoring tens of thousands of health professionals who argued that nothing less than a stay-at-home order would save this state from disaster. And not just this state.

Fort Campbell, a U.S. Army base that straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky border, restricted travel to Nashville. And Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, urged his citizens not to enter Tennessee . . . . If you ultimately go down over that border and go to a restaurant or something that’s not open in Kentucky, what you do is you bring the coronavirus back here.”

Kentucky, which not only elected a Democratic governor but also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, is an outlier in the South.

What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don’t have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out.

Viruses are not partisan. Science itself is not partisan. Nevertheless, Covid-19 has become a partisan issue here in the South because our governors have followed the lead of both [Trump] the president, who spent crucial early weeks denying the severity of the crisis, and Fox News, which downplayed concerns about the pandemic as Democratic hysteria. That’s why every governor who has issued a deeply belated shelter-in-place order is a Republican.

In that March 16 conference call with mayors and county leaders around Tennessee, Mr. Lee offered some advice: “I want to encourage you to pray. . . . . I want you to know that you’re being prayed for as leaders in your community that you will have wisdom and discernment.”

I, too, pray for my fellow Tennesseans. I pray for the success of researchers racing for a vaccine. I pray for the safety of every medical team working to save lives. But I also pray for our leaders to lead, to put the safety of their citizens far, far above partisan pandering. And when the entire medical community — people who are putting their very lives on the line for us — are begging for help, the answer isn’t prayer alone. It’s also action.

 One can only hope Republican idiocy doesn't lead to tragedy, but if it does, I hope citizens will hold their foolish, partisan governors accountable.