“The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do… If any blame or fault attaches to this attempt, it is mine alone.”
Penciled Note from D-Day Commander and Future President, Dwight David Eisenhower, June 6, 1944
“I don’t take responsibility at all.”
Donald John Trump on delays in testing and preparation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, March 13th.
Make no mistake, this isn’t
Republican vs Democrat issue. Look at Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s tenure during
and after World War I. He purged African Americans from the Civil Service and
refused to acknowledge the Spanish Flu pandemic (literally making that outbreak
a state secret even as over 600,000 Americans died from the outbreak), which
actually originated in a military training facility in central Kansas. Failed
leadership is hardly unique to either party.
But this one – here and now – is on Donald Trump.
Reality: if Trump does not take
responsibility for dealing with this pandemic, for the cuts he made to the CDC
budget, to the pandemic preparedness group he completely defunded, to the end
of the USAID program to share pandemic information across the globe, for the
decided lack of test kits, the failed centralized coordination at a federal
level (vs. Jared Kushner’s labeling necessary medical supplies held by the feds
as “ours”… supporting his father-in-law’s statement that the fed is not a
“shipping clerk”), his failure to follow the dire warnings from his closest
advisors and medical experts (in January) and his blaming
governors (because they are the ones that were in charge of taking care of their
residents), medical professionals (for exaggerating and hording), the World
Health Organization (which might not have been first to sound the alarm but one
that did sound the alarm well before Trump admitted the seriousness of the
outbreak), to his misguided combination of medical prescriptions and strong
assurances that the outbreak was either a “hoax” or on the verge of containment
leading to people’s not taking needed precautions… Donald Trump is simply
admitting his failure of leadership. According to Fox to Breitbart, however, the
folks to blame are precisely those medical experts who have provided facts to
us, not Donald Trump. Dr. Anthony Fauci is their public enemy number one.
If we go back to a full tilt economy
too early, as Trump and his Republican supporters want to have happen, we need
to prepare for a second wave of this pandemic. In the meantime, rural America
needs to prepare for severe COVID-19 problems in the immediate future! Even
with better treatment options, until the outbreak fades into a marginal risk,
according even to an internal White House report, we can expect that the road
will be at least 18 months. Until that disease fades, by the passage of time or
the wide deployment of an accessible vaccine, life cannot simply go back to
life as usual. Even for those businesses that might be able to begin to resume
operations earlier, social distancing will be a part of our culture for quite a
while. Remember, 30% of those infected with COVID-19, at any given time, are asymptomatic
carriers.
For those living in red states, where
Trump-supporting legislatures and governors are following the President’s lead
and suggest that they will continue to do so, we are beginning to see the new
hotspots in those red locales. If Trump presses a reopening for business as
usual as soon as he suggests, to the extent those GOP-strongholds follow suit,
they will become storage depots of the contagion even for all those more
prudent states that leave the protections in place longer, germs waiting to be
relaunched to the unwary Trump-believers… and then to the rest of us. Nature is
not bound by press briefings, political prognostications, human-directed timelines
or business aspirations. She does not hear blame. She just infects!
“But Trump [himself] is certain about
one thing — he and his administration are doing a ‘tremendous’ job. ‘I’d rate
it a 10,’ the president said… And if anything goes wrong, it’s someone else’s
fault.
“States are running out of
ventilators to keep hospital patients alive? That’s your problem, Governor; you
should have bought more machines three years ago… Hospitals are running low on
masks and gloves? You’re just not bidding hard enough — and maybe the employees
are stealing them… New supplies aren’t reaching hospitals fast enough? ‘We’re
not a shipping clerk,’ Trump said.
“The federal emergency stockpile was
disastrously low? That’s President Obama’s fault — never mind that he left
office more than three years ago. Or, more creatively, the Trump campaign
charged that it was actually Joe Biden’s fault… Tests weren’t available when we
needed them? That’s on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and
Obama again. ‘We inherited a broken system.’… When Trump’s own inspector
general reported this week that hospitals are still desperately short of
supplies, the answer from the president was: ‘Another Fake Dossier!’ [and
ripping that Inspector General directly!]
“Has the president ever acknowledged
that he or anyone he appointed ever contributed to any of these problems, even
inadvertently? If he has, I missed it — despite diligent and punishing
attention to his marathon White House briefings… For Trump, the buck always
stops somewhere else.” Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times, April 8th.
OK, the President is a serial
micromanager who defers responsibility and shifts blame when it is politically
expedient. In short, he has, by his own admission, abrogated his role as
national leader during this debacle. His willingness to contradict his own
experts, reverse positions, step away from responsibility and prioritize
revenge and his personal political agenda ahead of obvious national safety
requirements, by definition, have shifted leadership to others, notably our
governors… at least the ones willing to lead. See my Governors vs the President – Surviving
COVID-19 blog for more details. Fortunately, there are also federal
government leaders who are helping in spite of the President. Dr. Anthony
Fauci. Lieutenant General Todd T. Semonite,
the 54th Chief of Engineers and Commanding General of the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, who has miraculously been able to build functional hospitals in
gigantic public arenas. That’s just two.
Lacking empathy and an ability to show genuine
grief at the losses we have faced, Donald Trump is still a highly competitive
force in the upcoming presidential election. His loss is anything but assured.
Those who get their news from right wing biased media still do not recognize
that Trump is making it worse. His daily press briefings, something Joe Biden
cannot replicate (he’s not even a governor), put him in the public eye
constantly… allowing him to blame, castigate, lie, mislead and take credit for
anything and everything that could be perceived as positive (whether true or
not). Others have adopted a “rally around the flag” mentality that tends to
reelect incumbent presidents in the middle of a crisis… even if that leadership
is making terrible into horrible.
Trump also is battling a voting method, one
even he is using in Florida – vote by mail – because it increases the
turnout, and an increased turnout bodes badly for Republicans, by his own
admission. Claiming vote-by-mail foments fraud, despite zero evidence to that effect
(40% of voting Americans voted by mail in 2016), Trump enjoys the benefits of
gerrymandering and voter restrictions aimed at keeping Democrats and minorities
from a “one person, one vote” impact on the election. With a lot of help from
the US Supreme Court. If Democrats expect to prevent a continuation of the
growing Trump autocracy, laced with blithering incompetence, it is going to be
all about that turnout. And if we do not displace Mr. Trump in November,
everyone, red and blue, will suffer.
I’m
Peter Dekom, and if I survive this pandemic, I most definitely do not want to
live a world where the best leader we can elect could be a second term failed
Donald Trump.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment