Donald Trump proves that he is unfit to lead

"Surely some revelation is at hand..." W. B. Yeats

The Hill Reports 
The Globe argued that the “profound impact” the country is expected to experience during the crisis was “preventable,”

This Editorial Board opinion published in The Boston Globe is a public evisceration about Donald Trump's incompetent leadership.

Much of the suffering and death coming was preventable. Donald Trump has blood on his hands.

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold," wrote W. B. Yeats in 1919. A century later, it's clear: the epicenter cannot hold. Catastrophic decisions in the White House have doomed the world's ricchest country to a season of untold suffering.

In the United States, long a beacon of scientific progress and medical innovation with its world-class researach institutios and hospitals, is now the hub of a global pandemic that has infected at lest (March 31st) 745,000 people and already claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide.  Now, that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States- more than 140,000- has surpassed that of any other nation, Americans are consigned for the coming weeks to watching the illness fell family members and friends and to fearing for their own fate as they watch death tolls rise.  

While the spread of the novel coronavirus has been aggressive around the world, much of the profound impact it will have here in the United States was preventable. As the American public braces itself for the worst of this crisis, it's worth remembering that the reach of the virus here is not attributable to an act of God or a foreign invasion, but  colossal failure of leadership.

The outbreak that began in China demanded a White Huose that could act swiftly and competently to protect public health, informed by science and guided by compassion and public service.  It required an administration that could quickly deploy reliable tests around the nation to isolate cases and trace and contain the virus's spread as South Korea effectively did, as well as to manufacture and distrubte scarce medical supplies around the country. It begged for a presidential leader of the united States to deliver clear, consistend, scientifcally sound messages on the state of the epidemic and its solutions, to reassure the public amid their fear, and to provide steady guidance to cities and states. And it demanded a leader who would put the country's well-being first, above near-term stock market returns and his own reelection prospects, and who would work with other nations to stem the tide of COVID-19 cases around the world.

What we have instead is a president epically outmatched by a global pandemic. A failed president who, in late January, when the first confirmed coronavirus case was announced in the United States, downplayed the risk and insisted all was under control.  

A failed president who, rather than aggressively test all those who were exposed to the virus, said he'd prefer not to bring ashore passengers on a contaminated cruise ship so as to keep national case numbers (artifically) low. A failed president who, consistent with his mistrust and undermining of scientific fact, has misled the public about unproven cures for COVID-19 and who "baited-and-switched" about whether the country ought to end social distancing to open up by Easter, and then, on Saturday, about whether he'd impose a quarantine on New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.  

A failed president who has pledged to oversee the doling out of the $500 billion in corporae bailout money in the latest stimulus package, some of which will go to the travel industry, in which his family is invested. A president who spent a good chunk of a recent press conference complaining about how hard is for a rich man to serve in the White House even as Americans had already bgun to lose their jobs, their health care and their lives. A failed president who has reinforced racial stigma by calling the contagion a "Chinese virus" and failed to collaborate adquqately with other countries to continue their outbreaks and study the disease. A failed president who evades responsibility and refuses to acknowledge, let alone own, the bitter truth of National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci's testimony: that the country's testing rollout was "a failing".

Timing is everything in pandemic response.  It can make the difference between a contained local outbreak that endures a few weeks and an uncontrollable contagion that afflicts millions.  The filed Trump administration has made critical errors over the past two months, choosing early on to develop its own diagnostic test, which failed, instead of adopting the World Heath Organization's test- a move thaat kneecapped the US coronavirus response and, by most public health experts' estimation, will cost thousands if not hudnreds of thousands of American lives. Rather than making the expected federal effort to mobilize rapidly to distribute needed gowns, masks and ventialators to ill-equipped hospitals and to the doctors and nurses around the country who are left unprotected treating a burgeoning number of patients, the administraationd has instead beem caught outbidding individual states (including Massachuestts) trying to purchase medical supplies. It has dragged tis heels on invoking the Defense Production Act to get scarce, sorely needed ventilators and masks into production so that they can be distributed to hosptials nationawide, as they hit their peaks in the cycle of the epidemic. It has left governors and mayors in the lurch, begging for help.  The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary.  In other words, the failed president has blood on his hands.

Its not too much for Americans to ask of their leaders tht they be competent and informed when responding to a crises of historic proportions. Instead, they have a White House marred by corruption an dincompetence, whose mixed messages roil the markets and rock their sense of security. Instead of compassion and clarity, the failed president in his near daily addresses to the nation embodies callousness, self-concern and a lack of compass.  Dangling unverified cures and possible quarantines in front of the public like reality TV cliffangers, he unsettles rather than reassures.  

In fact, the pandemic reveals that the worst features of this failed presidency are not merely late-night comedy fodder and senseless #covfefe Tweet rants. Rather, they ccome at the cost of lives, livelihoods and our collective psyche.

Many pivotal decision points in this crisis are past us, but more are still to come. For our own sake, every American should be hoping for a miraculous turnaround- and that the "too-little, too-late" strategy from the White House task force will henceforth, at least, pevent contagion and economic ruin of the grandest scale. But, come November 2020, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensure under the failed president's watch.