There is an absolutely damning story at The New York Times:
As the U.S. confronted a new wave of infection and death through the summer and fall, the president’s approach to the pandemic came down to a single question: What would it mean for him?
Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, Noah Weiland, Sharon LaFraniere and Mark Mazzetti have put together a scathing portrait of what has been going on inside the White House as the pandemic swept over the United States. In the Times maddening style, they graphically understate it with captions like:
“President Trump not only ended up soundly defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr., but missed his chance to show that he could meet the defining challenge of his tenure.”
Here’s the summary:
Throughout late summer and fall, in the heat of a re-election campaign that he would go on to lose, and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in the spring, Mr. Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to a single question: What would it mean for him?
The result, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and others in contact with the White House, was a lose-lose situation. Mr. Trump not only ended up soundly defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr., but missed his chance to show that he could rise to the moment in the final chapter of his presidency and meet the defining challenge of his tenure.
To read this is to be enraged; there is so much that is wrong — not just with Trump but the people around him — even the ‘good’ people in the story have much to answer for. They were there, they saw what was happening, they knew what it would mean, and they said nothing to the rest of us.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died; millions became sick and may suffer lasting effects. It will be months until the pandemic is turned around. All this is now coming out, and it makes the complicity of the Republican Party and right wing media all the more heinous.
In a way, it’s almost more infuriating that the Times can still toss off phrases about Trump “rising to the moment”. The will to believe that Trump could ever do so after what we’ve seen for 5 years strains credulity — except among the media.
A few excerpts:
...“You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Mr. Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office on Aug. 19. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting.”
Mexico’s record in fighting the virus was hardly one for the United States to emulate. But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases.
...Mr. Kushner, who along with Hope Hicks, another top adviser, had been trying for months to convince Mr. Trump that masks could be portrayed as the key to regaining freedom to go safely to a restaurant or a sporting event, called embracing mask-wearing a “no-brainer.”
Mr. Kushner had some reason for optimism. Mr. Trump had agreed to wear one not long before for a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, after finding one he believed he looked good in: dark blue, with a presidential seal.
But Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff — backed up by other aides including Stephen Miller — said the politics for Mr. Trump would be devastating.
“The base will revolt,” Mr. Meadows said, adding that he was not sure Mr. Trump could legally make it happen in any case.
That was all Mr. Trump needed to hear. “I’m not doing a mask mandate,” he concluded.
...Once inside, Dr. Atlas used the perch of a West Wing office to shape the response. During a meeting in early fall, Dr. Atlas asserted that college students were at no risk from the virus. We should let them go back to school, he said. It’s not a problem.
Dr. Birx exploded. What aspect of the fact that you can be asymptomatic and still spread it do you not understand? she demanded. You might not die, but you can give it to somebody who can die from it. She was livid.
Read the whole thing, but be careful of your blood pressure. People should be going to jail for this; people should be publicly shamed. As bad as it has looked from the outside, this inside view is far worse.