Donald Trump is politically circling the drain

"It is sometimes said that wars make presidents great; tragedies and disasters can at the very least make their greatest moments. The enduring images of many presidencies came when the commander in chief had to rally and console the nation," David A. Graham

Donald Trump's failed leadership must be flushed out of our political system

\\\\\\\New England Journal of Medicine - On January 19, 2020, a 35-year-old man presented to an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, Washington, with a 4-day history of cough and subjective fever. 

Atlantic Magazine article by  David A. Graham:  It’s been 111 days since the first reported case of the coronavirus in the United States. It’s been 57 days since President Trump issued social-distancing guidelines, and 12 days since they expired. 

Yet the Trump administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.

Echoing his breezy language in the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump has in recent days returned to a blithe faith that the disease will simply disappear of its own accord, without a major government response.

Stupid Donald Trump! 

“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests: This is going to go away without a vaccine,” Trump said Friday. “It’s going to go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”

He added: “They say it’s going to go—that doesn’t mean this year—doesn’t mean it’s going to be gone, frankly, by fall or after the fall. But eventually it’s going to go away. The question is, will we need a vaccine? At some point it’s going to probably go away by itself. If we had a vaccine that would be very helpful.”

As for the cratering economy, which on Friday produced the worst jobs numbers on record, Trump shrugged. “We’re in no rush, we’re in no rush,” he said.

The president’s shiftlessness in the face of the greatest crisis of his presidency, and the greatest political threat during it, is confounding. Of course, Trump has faced mortal political threats before; less than five months ago, he became only the third president in American history to be impeached. He’s shown a remarkable ability to survive damaging situations. And his plans have often been derided by skeptics as unwise, unrealistic, or simplistic. This situation is different, though: Grappling with a multifront crisis, Trump seems to have no plan at all.

Let’s begin with efforts against the illness itself. The 45 days during which Trump recommended social distancing were meant to prevent hospitals from being swamped with patients, and give the government time to devise more effective measures. 

But when that period ended at the end of April, Trump simply let his recommendations lapse, opting not to extend them in favor of vague calls for reopening the economy.

Those six weeks didn’t actually buy the country much time, because the White House wasted them. With New York City removed from the numbers, the national curve hasn’t flattened at all. States continue to fend for themselves on tests and personal protective equipment. Trump held a White House event yesterday to tout growth in testing in the U.S., but the president’s rhetoric was misleading. The U.S. does not, as he claimed, lead the world in testing, on a per capita basis. He also continues to compare the U.S. rate favorably to South Korea’s, eliding that South Korea was able to control its outbreak sooner by testing faster, and thereby reducing its need for testing.

As my colleague Robinson Meyer has reported, based on figures in the COVID Tracking Project, which is housed at The Atlantic, the U.S. has increased testing but still needs to expand it dramatically to match expert recommendations. “To an almost astonishing degree, the U.S. has no national plan for achieving this goal,” Meyer writes. “There is no effort at the federal level that has mustered anything like the funding, coordination, or real resources that experts across the political spectrum say is needed to safely reopen the country.”

Trump’s struggles to convey any emotion but anger have been foretold in past crises. Consider the first great external disaster to strike the Trump administration, the 2017 hurricane season. Visiting Texas, the president seemed unable to relate to anything other than the massive size of Hurricane Harvey. And despite fitful attempts to telegraph that he cared, he stumbled even worse in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Trump argued that the storm was not a “real catastrophe” like Hurricane Katrina and callously tossed rolls of paper towels to desperate aid-seekers.

Trump’s inability to register the suffering may have played into the disastrous federal response to the storm. Eventual estimates placed the death toll from Maria at about 3,000 people, making it far more lethal than Katrina, and among the worst natural disasters in American history.