Politics
With Trump leading the way, America’s coronavirus failures exposed by record surge in new infections
By Toluse Olorunnipa, Josh Dawsey and Yasmeen Abutaleb
June 27 at 5:38 PM ET
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Later Friday, the United States recorded more than 40,000 new coronavirus cases — its largest one-day total.
It was the latest example of whiplash from the Trump administration, which has struggled to put forward a consistent message about the pandemic. While public health experts urge caution and preventive measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing, Trump, Pence and other top aides repeatedly flout their advice, leaving confused Americans struggling to determine who to believe.
“They’re creating a cognitive dissonance in the country,” one former senior administration official said. “It’s more than them being asleep at the wheel. They’re confusing people at this point when we need to be united.”
This portrait of a nation in crisis — and its failure to contain an epic pandemic — is based on interviews with 47 administration officials, lawmakers at the national and state level, congressional staff, federal and local health officials, public health experts and other current and former officials involved in the bungled and confused response.
America’s position as the world’s leader in coronavirus cases and deaths is in large part the result of human error, and the still-rising caseload stands as a stark reminder of the blunders that have characterized the national response. Trump’s actions, and his position in the Oval Office, make him a central figure in any assessment of the country’s handling of the outbreak.
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As local officials struggled to enforce stay-at-home orders and other restrictions, the virus continued to circulate throughout a country riven by partisan politics and devoid of a national public health strategy, said Max Skidmore, a political scientist at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and author of a book on presidential leadership during health crises.
“We’re the only country in the world that has politicized the approach to a pandemic,” he said.
Now, covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is advancing at an accelerated pace in the United States, even as other countries reopen their economies after getting their outbreaks under control. European diplomats are poised to approve an agreement that will reopen the European Union to travel from many countries but not American tourists, because the coronavirus is still raging in the United States.
In contrast, states from Arizona to Florida are pausing or reversing their attempts to reopen their economies.
The new peak in cases — coming so quickly after the first and with just months to go before a presidential election and an impending flu season — has alarmed public health experts and the president’s political allies.
“These epidemics are going to be hard to get under control,” said Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and an informal adviser to the Trump administration. He said he expects deaths to soon climb to more than 1,000 per day again. “It’s going to continue to spread until you do something to intervene. I’m not sure we are taking enough forceful action to break the trend right now.”
The president has dramatically scaled back the number of coronavirus meetings on his schedule in recent weeks, instead holding long meetings on polling and endorsements, his reelection campaign, the planned Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, Fla., the economy and other topics, according to two advisers, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
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Read the full article at the link.
There’re no “good” time for the insanity of a supposedly advanced nation putting an evil moron and his kakistocracy in charge. That’s particularly true when that evil, grotesque ignorance, and astounding dishonesty were well-advertised and documented in advance of the 2016 election.
How would you expect a jerk whose most famous line was “You’re fired” to perform in a leadership position requiring intelligence, integrity, compassion, vision, moral courage, and the ability to positively inspire others to perform? Duh!
It’s no mystery that a man without visible redeeming qualities will perform just as horribly, if not worse, than the majority of us predicted. But, next to a world war, a worldwide pandemic is probably the worst possible time to have “malicious incompetents” at the controls.
Got a healthcare crisis? Eliminating health insurance for 23 million Americans is the obvious solution!
This plane is going down folks. Better get a real pilot into the cockpit before it’s too late!
