Trump’s incompetence, and that of everyone he has chosen to surround him, don’t qualify as breaking news. But, with the election just one month away, one can hardly imagine a more clear and obvious demonstration of what competence actually amounts to than the most prominent and widespread life or death issue of our time, Covid-19. Anyone who cares to look can see that Joe Biden and the people he has chosen to surround him, are perfectly capable of running a Presidential campaign and transition preparations without lots of folks getting sick, whereas Trump and his team appear well on their way to infecting everyone in the GOP.
This isn’t about Trump having greater exposure because he’s a very busy President. In fact, Trump is a lazy couch potato who wastes endless hours daily gazing raptly at the FOX News Channel, whereas Joe Biden has a long history of hard work, and his fingerprints are all over his campaign. He sees as many people as Trump, maybe more, and he and his team have been active all over the country, but competently, safely.
This isn’t about smart and dumb. Achieving a reasonable degree of safety during the pandemic doesn’t demand rocket science. Wear a mask. Distance. Wash your hands, a lot. Joe repeats this on the regular, even reminding everyone during last Tuesday’s debate. Just do these simple things, keep doing them, don’t let anyone stop you. But Trump and his team lack the basic competence to carry out such simple instructions. After all, they’re smarter than the doctors, the generals, experts of all kinds who might disagree with their preconceived notions. Why would self confident people like that take instructions from anyone.
This isn’t about politics, as Joe Biden explicitly said, yesterday. The Trump team’s politics, if their policies and objectives can be called politics, are an entirely separate matter from questions of competence. From the very beginning of his Presidency, in a pattern destined to flop miserably, Trump has tried to operate the vast federal government through twitter threads, sometimes ambiguous, sometimes incomprehensible, consistently ineffective. Joe Biden’s competence at governance, of course, is a matter of record. But incompetence isn’t an occurrence, it’s a state of mind and a chronic condition.
It’s obvious that GOP bigwigs are dropping like flies with Covid-19 infections, while Democratic Party officials and the Biden/Harris campaign remain quite healthy. Voters who don’t really pay attention to the daily nuts and bolts of government and the Congress and White House, won’t likely fail to notice the contrast.