Politico’s health care reporter Dan Diamond has a damning piece up about how the Trump Administration has totally botched the response to coronavirus.
For six weeks behind the scenes, and now increasingly in public, Trump has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak — resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear. Members of Congress have grilled top officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield over the government’s biggest mistake: failing to secure enough testing to head off a coronavirus outbreak in the United States. But many current and former Trump administration officials say the true management failure was Trump’s.
“It always ladders to the top,” said one person helping advise the administration’s response, who noted that Trump’s aides discouraged Azar from briefing the president about the coronavirus threat back in January. “Trump’s created an atmosphere where the judgment of his staff is that he shouldn’t need to know these things.”
Interviews with 13 current and former officials, as well as individuals close to the White House, painted a picture of a president who rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news. For instance, aides heaped praise on Trump for his efforts to lock down travel from China — appealing to the president’s comfort zone of border security — but failed to convey the importance of doing simultaneous community testing, which could have uncovered a potential U.S. outbreak. Government officials and independent scientists now fear that the coronavirus has been silently spreading in the United States for weeks, as unexplained cases have popped up in more than 25 states.
www.politico.com/...
Read the whole depressing and sordid tale.
Trump and his movement have been a long exercise in denying reality — denying the reality of climate change, of the reality of the immigration situation in this country, of where America’s demographics are headed, of the actual effect of his tax cuts, of the economy’s performance which has basically continued along the same unequally distributed trajectory that it was already on, denying the reality of our health care system whose costs keep spiraling upwards while tens of millions have no insurance, and so on. Their worldview has been predicated on the view that if they just make up their own reality and plow ahead, everything will be fine.
And so far through sheer luck it hasn’t had any truly catastrophic ramifications. But the thing with reality is that eventually it comes crashing down on you. We found this out the hard way when we thought housing prices could magically keep going upward forever, that banks could lend money like drunken sailors to people and keep selling dogshit securities by pretending they were pumpkin pie, and sure enough in 2008 it all came crashing down.
A healthy country would respond to that by shaping up and gaining a more sober and responsible view of how we should proceed going forward. But in 2016 America decided to double-down on self-delusion.
Now we possibly stand on the precipice of another reality-crashing event. Except this time we won’t have many tools in the kit to save us. Economically, we’re already running a $1 trillion deficit so more deficit spending is going to be a tall order. Interest rates are already historically low so that’s not gonna help much.
And we have leadership that denies reality as a matter of standard practice, and really does not know how to do anything else. It’s leadership that’s replaced competent, experienced people with servile, clueless, bumbling toadies whose only skill seems to be kissing their boss’s ass and making sure the boss doesn’t see anything that might make pierce the alternate reality his ego depends on. That is a bad situation to be in when dealing with a health crisis that may cost countless lives.
Sooner or later, and if the medical experts are right it will likely be sooner, reality is going to come crashing down on Donald Trump and given how much he depends on self-delusion to keep going everyday, we are going to have a serious crisis. Trump is going to have to decide between his alternate reality and actual reality. But I fear that he is incapable of grappling with actual reality. This wouldn’t be so terrible if he was still hosting The Apprentice or running his hotels, but the lives of millions of Americans are at stake here. This is deadly serious shit.
We’re so fucked.