As much of a stretch as it may be, imagine Trump is a used car salesman.
Not just that, but he is trying to convince you that, rather than cheap, scheduled preventative maintenance for your car, it makes more financial sense to just let it deteriorate and then buy another car, and to repeat this process every few years. But, it’s probably just a coincidence that his commission depends on selling more cars.
But this is basically the Trump response to the Wuhan Coronavirus, which is now on the brink of full-blown pandemic.
Instead of preventative maintenance for your car, like an oil change, we are instead talking about local, state, and federal health organizations on the frontlines of disease outbreak and monitoring. These systems require some spending up-front — such as the $48.8 million funding shared with 49 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico as part of the Affordable Care Act, but compared to trying to contain the damage that would happen if those systems were not in place, it is rather easy to see how they would pay for themselves ten-times over. As an example, the $2.5 BILLION that the Trump regime just asked for in emergency funding. And will likely get, now that the consequences of inaction would be so dire.
And while Trump is very much emblematic of this — for example, all of this while constantly calling for funding cuts to the NIH, CDC, and other health organizations that we rely on to prevent and combat biothreats like the coronavirus — in reality, this is all just the same plays out of the Republican Party’s playbook for addressing society’s most vital responsibilities. They make the same plays with regards to climate change and natural disasters, for example. Do everything they can to cut the preventative, relatively-cheap systems in place to monitor and respond to these threats, and then when disaster predictably strikes, require tons more in emergency funding, because the systems that could have helped were either cut to the bone, or dismissed as wasteful. And they do all this, with a straight face, while claiming the mantle of “fiscal responsibility.”
It’s not just about funding either. Because when you don’t have these systems in place, planning and training for years for when the worst scenario strikes, and generally streamlining as much of the process as possible, things turn chaotic.
Building on the Ebola experience, the Obama administration set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council (NSC) and another in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.
But that’s all gone now.
In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
Countering misinformation, conspiracy theories, rumormongering, and discriminatory behavior against people believed to be disease spreaders requires thoughtful communication from leadership at the highest levels of government. None is in evidence.
The Trump PR machine wants to project to the world that it has a good response in place for the Wuhan Coronavirus. It doesn’t.
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Adding to the problem is that Trump has slashed funding for the CDC, the National Institute of Health, and the Agency for International Development, while dismantling the entire global health team in charge of handling pandemics. As the CDC has struggled to obtain critical information about the outbreak from China, Trump has praised the nation’s response, reportedly because he’s worried about upsetting President Xi as the two struggle to hammer out a trade deal. More recently, the government overruled the CDC’s advice and put 14 Americans infected with the coronavirus on a plane back to the U.S. with others who were not infected. Trump was reportedly shocked and upset by the move, but the fact that he didn’t know about it (allegedly) is more evidence of how ill-equipped the administration is to handle an outbreak.
By his own admission, Trump does not take this threat seriously. This is also in evidence based on how ill-prepared his administration is for responding to a coronavirus pandemic — or even future ones that are just as likely in the horizon. And at the end of the day, when the problem is likely at its most massive and millions of American lives are on the line, only then will Trump and the Republican Party likely come to admit the full threat that the American public faces — and likely along with their hands out for ten times as much emergency aid as they refused to invest in better systems in the first place.
Who would think it makes far more sense to get an oil change instead of a whole new car, after all?