Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi knows what nearly every other concerned citizen and public servant knows: If Trump would truly step aside and let someone with some competence handle the coronavirus response, the entire country would be much better off.
"What we need is a central command," Pelosi told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Monday night, "for the president of the United States to say somebody is in charge of just seeing what we need, what's in the supply chain, what isn't, getting it to the places, the hot spots where it's needed, moving it on after that. We don't have that."
No, we don't. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly pleaded Sunday night with incoming White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for Trump to appoint a coronavirus czar. Schumer even offered a helpful list of candidates who might actually have the heft to do it.
So far, all we have seen from Trump is a parade of kinda sorta coronavirus handlers who are either completely unfit for the job or haven't been given full authority, or a little of both.
At the outset, it seemed like Trump had put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the response, but he only shows up at the White House Task Force briefings to handle the boring questions about public health that Trump doesn't like answering. Then FEMA was supposedly running point on the response, with FEMA administrator Peter Gaynor declaring on March 20 that he had "every single federal agency" along with commercial partners at his disposal. But a little over a week later, governors were still desperately seeking critical supplies in a phone call with Trump in which he declared, "I haven't heard about testing in weeks."
Then Trump rolled out his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who hasn't succeeded at much of anything in life except kissing up to Trump. Kushner explained that the federal stockpile wasn't meant for the states, saying, "It's supposed to be our stockpile." Who exactly Kushner meant by our is still a mystery, but it seemed pretty clear he had left the American people out of his definition. Kushner appears to have been benched again, at least in terms of public appearances.
After the Kushner debacle, the White House tapped logistics expert Navy Rear Admiral John Polowczyk, who is supposedly streamlining FEMA's supply chain. Polowczyk made some impressive claims last week about the federal government pushing out some 27.1 million surgical masks, 19.5 million N95 masks, 22.4 million pairs of protective gloves, 5.2 million face shields, and more than 7,600 ventilators.
Only problem was, none of the supplies were getting pushed out directly to the state governments and hospitals that need the critical supplies. Instead, Polowczyk explained the product they were moving was "primarily commercial product that would enter the commercial system," where states were then pitted against each other in an eBay-style bidding war. "I'm not here to disrupt a supply chain," Polowczyk said.
But in the words of Retired Army Lt. General Russel Honoré: "It's not fucking working! You can talk shit all you want at the White House podium, [but] it's not working!" Honoré, who in 2005 led the Joint Task Force Katrina effort to help get military relief to the battered Gulf Coast region, was known for both his salty language and getting results.
Honoré not only gave that frank assessment to NPR, he also appeared on MSNBC Friday to offer one of the most coherent explanations of how the Pentagon could streamline the supply chain if FEMA were benched.
First of all, Honoré said the White House was "confused as to what their No. 1 priority is," trashing the idea that FEMA is pushing crucial supplies into the private sector. "This is the responsibility of the federal government, to provide those goods that are need after a disaster or during a disaster—that is the sole mission of the Defense Coordinating agency inside of FEMA," he offered.
Honoré was baffled by Polowczyk's declaration that he didn't want to "disrupt" the supply chain. The Defense Production Act, he said, "would have allowed the president to be able to send that [equipment] where it's needed; not to send it into the commercial market where FEMA and the governors and hospitals independently are competing trying to buy it."
Also, Kushner's notion that the federal stockpile wasn't intended for the states was just bogus. "He has no idea what the hell he's talking about," Honoré noted.
But ultimately, Honoré said the best organization to coordinate this massive nationwide response is the Pentagon, not FEMA. "FEMA wasn't designed to deal with 50 states simultaneously within 10 regionals," he said, continuing: "It's time for FEMA to hand some of its mission off to the Department of Defense."
Right now, FEMA is running point, giving orders to DOD to carry out certain missions. "You're handicapping one of the most capable organizations you have," he explained.
Honoré recommended dividing the country into maybe 6 different districts with 2- and 3-star generals coordinating directly with the state governors on necessary supplies.
“You're not using the power and capacity of the DOD to defend the nation because the nation must be defended," he said. "We gotta have a chain of command."
What was perhaps most frightening about Honoré's explanation was how amazingly coherent it was compared to anything we've heard from the White House for the last several months. Even since Trump supposedly started taking the novel coronavirus seriously, no one has supplied an even relatively reasonable explanation for why states and hospitals haven't been able to get the life-saving resources they need and how the supply chain could be improved. And then there's a retired Army general on cable TV offering a master class in supply, demand, logistics, and the federal government’s chief responsibilities during a national emergency.
But everything Honoré recommended would require Trump to step aside and truly hand the reins to a single point person who is empowered to streamline the national response, like Pelosi, Schumer, and others have been clamoring for.
To be honest, Trump is temperamentally incapable of stepping aside and yielding the spotlight, even when he's proving to be a miserable failure and lives hang in the balance.