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INEPTITUDE BUMBLING & Co

In his dreams, Donald Trump is in total control of everything in the US

In his dreams, Donald Trump is in total control of everything in the US
US President Donald Trump. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Stefani Reynolds / and Tasos Katopodis)

Are US President Donald Trump’s efforts on Covid-19 a confused, inadequate response, or will he be able to successfully shift the responsibility – and the blame – on to state governors, China and the World Health Organisation?

This past week, in common with most of the rest of the globe, the coronavirus epidemic has continued to hold the United States in its grip. During this week, however, it has become increasingly difficult to determine what, exactly, the Trump administration’s game plan actually is, save for the fact most of its actions are part of an electoral strategy for 2020’s presidential and general election, rather than any well-thought-through, comprehensive, national public health strategy.

On Sunday, Trump gave oxygen to the #FireFauci movement by retweeting one of the more malignant messages urging his removal. Dr Anthony Fauci is, of course, the nation’s best-known immunologist and a highly visible, straight-thinking, voice-of-reason member of the president’s own Covid-19 task force. 

Fauci has managed, so far, at least most of the time, to keep the president from veering off into fanciful, totally unexplored territory with public health policy, but he has been powerless to prevent the president from engaging in those extended, möbius strip-like rants that end up including as targets Muslims, the World Health Organisation (WHO), elected Democrats, former president Barack Obama, a supposed lack of bullets for the military, the perfidious Chinese (except when it concerns Trump’s friendship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping), and so many other topics one easily loses count.

But then, on Monday, the president went on a new tear, telling the nation that as president he had total control over everything in the nation, as he effectively threatened to seize power from the respective states in a pronouncement that floored politicians and constitutional scholars alike.  (Somebody in the White House might consider giving the president a four-colour, illustrated copy of the Constitution in big type, most especially Article X, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Things like quarantines.)

Then, the next day, on Tuesday, the president unveiled a new advisory council, ostensibly to put the economy back on track. Nevertheless, a number of the business leaders named to the body were nonplussed to discover that after participating in a telephone conference they were suddenly council members, and the First Daughter and First Son-in-Law were as well. So far, at least, despite the urgency of a coordinated plan, little has come from out of this body.

Ah, but the week was still young. So much time available still, and so much more mischief and confusion to create. On Wednesday, Trump threatened to seize power from the Congress by adjourning both houses – if they didn’t do exactly what he wanted in terms of further stimulus and pandemic emergency measures. Again, the constitutional scholars have had to point out that such an assertion of power has never even been tried in the history of the nation, let alone its rather dubious constitutionality.

Then, on Thursday,  he decided it would no longer be his administration’s job to deal with ramping up viral testing, contact tracing of the infected, or perhaps even vaccine research. He abruptly shucked off his threat from earlier in the week about seizing total power and instead pushed the first two tasks on to the governments of the 50 states, rather than seeing this as an obvious opportunity and necessity for national coordination and federal-state-local governmental cooperation.

This came despite warnings from public health professionals across the US that hospitals nationwide continue to need emergency federal help, including supplies that remain in short supply such as the decidedly low-tech medical cotton swab, or the chemical reagents necessary to run any of the Covid-19 exposure tests. 

Moreover, viral testing still needs to be ramped up to at least three times current levels (with some experts saying the need is for more testing by an order of magnitude). This would bump it up to at least the level of 1% to 2% of the total population in order to get sufficient sampling for better forecasts and analysis.  

While the president says there have been up to 27 million tests carried out, the best figure seems to be fewer than four million – out of a population of nearly 350 million. (Yes, the lower figure is higher than the level of testing in South Korea, the gold standard of testing. However, South Korea’s population is just a fraction of the US’s.)  

Building on the still-required much higher level of testing, there is the equally critical task of contact tracing of contagion, something that cannot be something each state should sort out for themselves. Minus either of these two efforts, no real pathway exists for effective national predictions or in tracking the vectors of new hot spot infections.

As a result of all this chipping, chopping, and changing, a number of states in several groupings, one in the northeast, centring around New York; one in the midwest; and one including the Pacific states are trying to put together coordination, but, unfortunately, the virus doesn’t read maps and thus has had little problem crossing state boundaries as it spreads into more rural, more lightly settled states in the centre of the nation – worryingly now including infections in major meatpacking plants that supply appreciable shares of the nation’s beef, pork, and poultry supplies.

Then, at the end of the week, the president sent out a series of incendiary tweets supporting mobs of weapons-carrying protesters in several states – all with Democratic Party governors – calling for those states’ “liberation” from continuing lockdowns and move to a reopened economy, and he managed to conflate this with Second Amendment gun ownership.

Amazingly, such language, and the idea the governors were making inappropriate decisions antithetical to the American way of life, was in disagreement with the president’s own vague guidelines/recommendations plan, released on Thursday. (A good courtroom prosecutor might even make a pretty strong case that the president was advocating or fomenting insurrection against the government.)

Underneath these confusing and contradictory messages from the president over the past week, there were two major issues. 

The first of these was the way and pace for a reopening of the economy, moving from a near-lockdown in most of the country to a phased return to something approaching normality, given, of course, the need to test employees, customers, suppliers and so forth. (The question of what the new normality would actually be, given the likelihood Covid-19 would not be banished for at least a couple of years, should make it hard to describe what that new normal will be.)

Or, as Donald McNeil wrote in The New York Times, “Yet President Trump this week proposed guidelines for reopening the economy and suggested that a swath of the United States would soon resume something resembling normalcy. For weeks now, the administration’s view of the crisis and our future has been rosier than that of its own medical advisers, and of scientists generally.

“In truth, it is not clear to anyone where this crisis is leading us. More than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history shared their thoughts on the future during in-depth interviews [in this article]. When can we emerge from our homes? How long, realistically, before we have a treatment or vaccine? How will we keep the virus at bay?

“Some felt that American ingenuity, once fully engaged, might well produce advances to ease the burdens. The path forward depends on factors that are certainly difficult but doable, they said: a carefully staggered approach to reopening, widespread testing and surveillance, a treatment that works, adequate resources for health care providers – and eventually an effective vaccine.

“Still, it was impossible to avoid gloomy forecasts for the next year. The scenario that Mr. Trump has been unrolling at his daily press briefings – that the lockdowns will end soon, that a protective pill is almost at hand, that football stadiums and restaurants will soon be full – is a fantasy, most experts said.”

The second underlying issue is the presumed culpability of China in all this. Was China somehow complicit in allowing this virus to reach the wider world; was the World Health Organisation in cahoots with China in minimising the extent of the disease and its severity; and should the US somehow try to extract some kind of compensation from China for all of this?

On both major themes, the president has had a very disconcerting track record since January. 

On the first theme, the president has been vociferous in pushing for the earliest possible return to that new normality so the country’s economy can recover. There are obviously direct political motives in this. It is not usually good for a reelection bid if 22 million people are suddenly collecting unemployment cheques and lining up at food banks, if more than a million jobs have actually evaporated, if medical services in many parts of the country are stretched to the limit, if thousands of small businesses have been shuttered, and if the stock market – Trump’s ultimate measure of success – is now close to the level it was when Trump took office, rather than the blowing-the-roof-off-the market level of just a few months ago. Anybody who fails to understand the importance of these points should check Herbert Hoover’s reelection bid in 1932, during the Great Depression, against Franklin Roosevelt.

As for the second, it is important to note that until recently, the president had been applauding the Chinese response to the outbreak, that is until it became clear that neither his own administration nor the World Health Organisation had initially pointed to the severity of the outbreak until it had already begun its spread to the rest of the world. 

Of course, the White House had then pooh-poohed the issue for a month, when that time could have been used to set mechanisms in place to prepare for it. Then the president found fertile ground in chastising the Chinese and the WHO as the real bad guys, once criticism of his less than effective response was becoming stronger and stronger. The president’s modus operandi has always been to find an enemy he can demonise as the cause of his problems, but having run through his usual domestic critics, he has fastened on China – and now the WHO – as villains of the piece.

However, consider the chronology in all this. As commentator analyst Fareed Zakaria explained over the weekend, “President Trump now tells us China is to blame for the havoc that the novel coronavirus is wreaking across the world. He has blocked funding to the World Health Organisation for colluding with China in keeping the facts hidden. To evaluate these claims, just keep in mind one tweet from the president, on Jan. 24. ‘China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,’ Trump wrote. ‘The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!’

“What did the world – including Trump – know about the virus at that point? One day earlier, on Jan. 23, the WHO warned that ‘all countries should be prepared for containment [of the virus], including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread.’ By this point, stories about the virus were all over the news. China had announced that the virus was being transmitted between humans and had begun locking down Hubei province.

“As for the U.S. government, on Jan. 18, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had briefed Trump on the dangers of the virus. By Jan. 24, there were two confirmed cases of the disease in the United States. On Jan. 27, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a Level 3 warning to avoid nonessential travel to China.

“On Jan. 29, Trump tweeted, ‘Just received a briefing on the Coronavirus in China from all of our GREAT agencies, who are also working closely with China.’ That very day, one of Trump’s most trusted aides, Peter Navarro, wrote a memo warning about a pandemic that could kill up to half a million Americans. Navarro warned that Chinese reports indicated the virus was likely far more contagious than the flu, more like the bubonic plague or smallpox. The next day, Jan. 30, the WHO declared a global public health emergency. Hours later, Trump assured his supporters, ‘We’re working very strongly with China on the coronavirus. … We think it’s going to have a very good ending.’ Was Trump telling the truth about China then, or is he telling the truth now?

“Let me be clear: With regard to Covid-19, China engaged in a coverup and the WHO did not push back enough. Local officials in Wuhan knew about the disease early but chose to minimize fears about it and punish doctors who spoke out. Beijing for its part kept a tight lid on information, refused help from the CDC and gave the WHO limited access to Wuhan. It is highly likely that China is still giving us unreliable data about the numbers of infected and dead. China’s repressive regime always controls and manipulates information to serve its larger interests.” 

But none of that excuses Trump’s earlier lavish praise of the Chinese – until he needed a bad guy to blame.

In the weeks ahead, Americans will be watching the nation’s governors, operating in different environments with divergent testing circumstances, as they each stumble into the great unknown and hope they don’t end up killing their citizens as they move towards rolling back the shutdown. As Politico pointed out, this is a high-risk political strategy. 

“Trump’s shift from a national approach – ‘30 days to slow the spread’ that saved perhaps millions of lives but wrecked a strong economy – transfers the burden of responsibility. Governors are now asked to decide how much misery their people can endure. They’ll be vindicated for bravery or shamed for creating danger. Their economies could break out in recovery, or crumble further from a coronavirus resurgence. Businesses and investors will watch a real-time experiment underway in 50 petri dishes, hoping for clarity rather than confusion.”

As states like Texas and Florida begin to open up again, public health officials – and voters – will be watching carefully to see if the infection rates and fatalities begin to rise as well. The fear, of course, is that the various governors will roll back restrictions too quickly and a second Covid-19 wave will come crashing down hard.

What has clearly been learned in all this is that the nation’s health care infrastructure has been “weighed, measured and found wanting” – just as Balthazer’s kingdom was in the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel. The country clearly needs a stronger, more robust, better-equipped health infrastructure – including diagnostic tests for coronavirus, antibody tests and contact tracing. This is on top of the frantic cries for the basic protective gear that was nowhere in sufficient supply.

All of these issues will assuredly play a major role in the upcoming presidential election – and whether Donald Trump can con an already less-than-convinced public (per the most recent polling by the Pew Research Center ) that his plans and programmes were sufficient; and whether or not his opponent can make the case for the incumbent’s departure from the White House because of these very stumbles and the economic disaster that ensued as a result of it. DM

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