Pandemic Politics and Its Failure

“President Trump and his bold actions from the very beginning of this pandemic stand in stark contrast to the do-nothing Democrats and radical left who just complain, criticize and condemn anything this president does to preserve this nation.” -- Disinformation from the radical right White House spokesman Judd Deere blaming others for White House failures in dealing with the pandemic

“But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.” -- New York Times commenting on the White House plan to shift responsibility for the pandemic from the president and federal government to the states

“Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.” -- Ideological disinformation spin from the radical right White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to help shift responsibility from the Trump administration to the states

A New York Times investigation looked into the details of why the federal pandemic response was so poor and why we are still in such deep trouble. The story is disgusting and tragic, but not surprising. In essence, the White House response was being run by political operatives with no public health experience. The one real expert, Dr. Deborah Birx, was sincere but wrong about projecting the pandemic would ease and the economy could reopen. She was blindsided by the president's actions that undercut the effort to keep the virus in check. The political operatives were taking their cues from the president, not from public health experts. It turned out that there really was one answer for all of America, but the White House ignored it, or psychologically could not accept it, for purely political reasons.

The deadly mistake came in a period beginning in mid-April when the president and his team convinced themselves that the pandemic was going away like magic. They also falsely believed that they had given state governments everything they needed to contain it. In their minds, it was time end the lockdown.

The NYT writes:

“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.

Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless 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.”

It took until early June for the White House to begin to realize that their assumptions were wrong. According to the NYT article, people in the White House are still debating how publicly honest to be about the seriousness of the situation. Obviously, there is be no acceptance of responsibility for failures by this mendacious president or his mendacious enablers. The president was trapped by his own upbeat but false statements that things would turn out just fine very soon and it was time to reopen the economy.

The president did extend the lockdown period in April, but during that time he and his aides worked to build their case that the federal government had done its job very well and the president had no responsibility for the failed response.

The rest of the article describes the purely political mindset that drove the president and his White House into needless failures and unjustifiable denial of responsibility. The rest of the country is now paying a very heavy price for politics as usual.