“I alone can fix it.”
Donald J. Trump on the 2016 campaign trail
The most pressing national crisis since the 2008 economic collapse and maybe even the 9/11 tragedy and we have a game show host in charge. And worse yet, the game show host not only ignores science, doctors, his COVID-19 team, he exasperates the problem by holding self-aggrandizing and combative pressers, spewing his obligatory phalanx of lies, attacking the press, fighting with governors, and continuously misrepresenting the level of danger. He refutes facts that expose his world of denial, and daily jeopardizing lives. If pre-president Donald Trump, Twitter fiend, was around to toss grenades from the sidelines at this Trump, President Idiot, it would be some show.
I alone can fix it.
The President, this poor excuse for a human being, is failing. And it is costing us the very fabric of this country; morally and economically. No, he did not cause this, as much as George W. Bush caused 9/11 or FDR caused Pearl Harbor or Herbert Hoover caused the Great Depression (that one was on Coolidge), but ignoring signs, not listening to the experts and posing rather than doing made it worse. And it has gotten worse. As a whole, the federal government, that Trump continues to excuse as some sort of feckless bystander to tragedy, passing the buck to the states, blaming the World Health Organization, the Chinese, CNN, and even, get this, Barack Obama, who hasn’t been president in four years, has dropped the ball and replaced it with lame excuses.
In fact, in 2018 Trump, aided by his eventually sacked national security advisor John Bolton, unceremoniously disbanded the Global Health Security Team, established under the Obama administration in response to the Ebola outbreak. At the time experts warned against this maneuver, but was duly ignored, a Trump dullard specialty. So, while countries like New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea use technology, communication, science—not to mention getting on this as early as December of last year—lap us in efficacy, we continue to read stories of American citizens dying in hallways of hospitals, not enough testing, a woeful and criminal lack equipment for doctors and nurses, and complete chaos.
The lack of testing alone, an egregious oversight by the federal government, has led to thousands of illnesses and deaths that could have been prevented. Testing earlier or at all would have revealed what minimum testing is now showing, the preponderance of cases on the East Coast have come from Europe not China, Trump spent over a month ignoring experts and proper decorum for a U.S. president in the midst of a global pandemic, calling it the Wuhan Virus and diddling before finally banning travel there.
“I alone can fix it” no longer applies. It never did. Trump is and has always been a fraud, and while it has cracked holes in our democratic system for three years, this year it has reached the point of deadly saturation. And none of this had to happen. And if it did, not this badly. It is on him and his government.
Never mind politics here. It is simple common decency or at the very least leadership skills. No one should ever begin a story about this pandemic with, “Trump feuds with…” or “Trump attacks…” But that is what we see day after day as people get ill and die. What the fuck is this guy doing touting his Facebook popularity, making jokes about dating super models, and denying the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Doctor Anthony Fauci, a chance to refute his nonsense about taking an untested drug (a drug he reportedly owns a stake in) at a press conference that sounds more like his brainless fascist rallies than serious updates?
We need consistent, calming leadership. Instead we get utter stupidity.
Low-lights include Trump announcing he was placing a “very powerful hold” on funding for the World Health Organization, even though it correctly identified the scale of the virus when he told the nation in January, “We have it totally under control” and “The stock market looks good to me.” Then, (during the same press conference!), when pressed on the “funding hold’, he insisted he never said it. Then when Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow admitted that a small business rescue program was off to “a bad start” after recipients struggled to register funds, Trump took to the podium and called it “a roaring success” and then for some reason said his daughter Ivanka “personally created fifteen-million jobs.”
How many times, for months, did the president tell us “Anyone who wants one can take a test?” You can’t even get tests as I write this here in New Jersey, the second largest number of infected in the country. It is April. In his ongoing feuds against states, in which he’s acted more like a foreign enemy than president, Trump told New York City it was overreaching when asking for ventilators and masks and basic necessities to assist in what last month looked to be a total disaster area in the state. As I write this there are more people with coronavirus in New York State than any country in the world.
I alone can fix it.
The kicker of this week was when Trump, junior fascist, removed Defense Department Inspector General Glenn Fine from a post monitoring the two-trillion dollar stimulus funds so he could oversee the package directly with zero oversight and keep the new inspector from reporting to Congress on the handling of the funds, something clearly expressed in the law.
Then we got this doozy this week; The New York Times revealed that a top economic official, Peter Navarro, had written a memo to the president in January warning that the coronavirus could become a “full blown pandemic” causing trillions of dollars in economic damage and risking the health of millions of Americans. Even in the days and weeks after Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar alerted Trump about the virus, and the stock market – “Looks good to me” – began to tank more rapidly than any time in many of our lifetimes, Trump told people to go to work, hosted eight rallies, and played golf six times.
I alone can fix it.
Trump has mostly been a failure during this abysmal first term. He is the third president to be impeached. He has never had over 45-percent popularity. He has destroyed the State Department, made a mockery of the United States abroad, repeatedly embarrassed the nation and its standing as a true, reliable ally, fueled racial, political, and cultural divides, and basically acted like an asshole. But never has any of this been so dangerous in such a crucial time.
History will mark this as one of the worst examples of leadership during a catastrophe in U.S. history.
But no need to wait for that.
“I alone can fix it.”
Trump has failed his crisis test.
