A host of damaging presidential traits
The Post has a big wrap-up story on how badly Trump failed to deal with the pandemic.
In mid-November, expecting a surge of cases after Thanksgiving, four members of the task force decided to try to move the needle.
After their warnings had gone largely unheeded for months in the dormant West Wing, Deborah Birx, Anthony S. Fauci, Stephen Hahn and Robert Redfield together sounded new alarms, cautioning of a dark winter to come without dramatic action to slow community spread.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among the many Trump aides who were infected with the virus this fall, was taken aback, according to three senior administration officials with knowledge of the discussions. He told the doctors he did not believe their troubling data assessment. And he accused them of outlining problems without prescribing solutions.
What business does Mark Meadows have telling four medical experts that he doesn’t believe what they’re telling him about the pandemic? He was a real estate developer before he got into politics. How would he know better than they do?
The doctors explained that the solutions were simple and had long been clear — among them, to leverage the power of the presidential bully pulpit to persuade all Americans to wear masks, especially the legions of Trump supporters refusing to do so, and to dramatically expand testing.
Emphasis mine. He could have done that and it would have made a big difference. He could have used the bully’s pulpit to tell people to socially distance, to stay away from crowds, to make some sacrifices, and to wear a goddam mask.
On Nov. 19, hours after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised against Thanksgiving travel, Vice President Pence, who chairs the coronavirus task force, agreed to hold a full news conference with some of the doctors — something they had not done since the summer. But much to the doctors’ dismay, Pence did not forcefully implore people to wear masks, nor did the administration take meaningful action on testing.
As for the president, he did not appear at all.
So thousands of people die of the virus every day, so what.
“We were always going to have spread in the fall and the winter, but it didn’t have to be nearly this bad,” said Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner in the Trump administration. “We could have done better galvanizing collective action, getting more adherence to masks. The idea that we had this national debate on the question of whether masks infringed on your liberty was deeply unfortunate. It put us in a bad position.”
And why did Trump blow it so comprehensively? Partly out of deep stupidity, for sure, but the rest? I don’t know. Because he’s a psychopath, because he got his jollies mocking the whole idea of trying to avoid the virus, because he’s a psychopath, because he’s jealous and resentful of Fauci, because he’s a psychopath. I don’t know. I can’t make it make sense.
The catastrophe began with Trump’s initial refusal to take seriously the threat of a once-in-a-century pandemic. But, as officials detailed, it has been compounded over time by a host of damaging presidential traits — his skepticism of science, impatience with health restrictions, prioritization of personal politics over public safety, undisciplined communications, chaotic management style, indulgence of conspiracies, proclivity toward magical thinking, allowance of turf wars and flagrant disregard for the well-being of those around him.
His combination of evil and stupidity, in short. I wish we could dig a hole in the ground and push him into it and pile a ton of dirt on him and walk away singing a tune.
“There isn’t a single light-switch moment where the government has screwed up and we’re going down the wrong path,” said Kyle McGowan, who resigned in August as chief of staff at the CDC under Redfield, the center’s director. “It was a series of multiple decisions that showed a lack of desire to listen to the actual scientists and also a lack of leadership in general, and that put us on this progression of where we’re at today.”
So imagine you’re on a train, you and 350 million of your closes friends, and up ahead you see the railway bridge fall down into the gorge – do you pull the emergency cord or do you just shrug and laugh? Trump shrugged and laughed.
At the heart of the problem, experts say, have been Trump’s scrambled and faulty communications.
“Words matter a lot, and what we have here is a failure to communicate — and worse than that, the effective communication of policies, of myths, of confusion about masks, about hydroxychloroquine, about vaccines, about closures, about testing,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director in the Obama administration. “It’s stunning.”
Maybe he just doesn’t understand cause and effect. Maybe he doesn’t grasp that if the big boss sneers at the experts and makes a point of ignoring their advice, other people will do the same and then bad things will happen.
I posted this link in Miscellany Room 6, but it works here too:
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2020/12/17/republican-crimes-against-humanity/
Well, not quite all. They took a lot more years from the 315,000 and counting who are dead.
<blockquote.And why did Trump blow it so comprehensively? Partly out of deep stupidity, for sure, but the rest? I don’t know. Because he’s a psychopath, because he got his jollies mocking the whole idea of trying to avoid the virus, because he’s a psychopath, because he’s jealous and resentful of Fauci, because he’s a psychopath. I don’t know. I can’t make it make sense.
That’s a handy short list of some of Trump’s better points, now filed under ‘Trump: better points’.
But this site is strangely silent on his worst. I await a list of them with intense interest.
This is what I felt when I received the form I must fill out for my employer to be allowed to continue remote work. There is no way to fill the form out that will result in anything but rejection of the request. It is a long form, would take my doctor probably at least 3 hours to fill out, hours he could spend better, and it’s obvious a single word would be enough for them to hang a refusal on. They also are asking for information they are not allowed to have – like my diagnoses and treatment. Violations of HIPPA, FERPA, and probably any number of other acronyms. Meanwhile, there appears to be no solution that could be in place prior to the semester starting. Any intervention by the union is likely to take so long the semester will be over or I will be dead before it finishes, because the school always files for extensions on union challenges, then they appoint a panel who will say exactly what the administration wants, then they file more extensions, etc.
Oh, one more acronym they might be violating: ADA. And that is my ace in the hole. They appear to be deadly afraid of running afoul of ADA.
I blame Trump. This area is so flooded with Trump types that the administration is probably afraid to allow any sort of commitment to stopping the virus; they deny campus spread even when there is obviously campus spread. They claim people aren’t dying of it anymore even as they are. And they claim they are taking all possible measures to deal with it, which of course they are not.
I’m terrified right now. My asthma is so out of control my doctor is worried there may be something more, and if I don’t respond to the latest added medicines, he is going to send me to a pulmonologist to find out if I have some other condition in my lungs in addition to the asthma, and my boss is worried that I might work from home instead of sitting in my office knowing people around the campus are shedding their masks at every possible excuse.
I think I’ve got a pretty good working theory of what happened.
Trump was obsessed with keeping the economy chugging along in an election year. He personally has always treated the Dow Jones as the ultimate indicator of a president’s success (it’s why he bragged so much about it). And lots of political science models show the importance of economic growth in Q1 and Q2 of an election year for the incumbent’s re-election chances.
So Trump was vehemently opposed to any kind of shutdown or stay-at-home orders, on the federal or state level. In order to justify that, you have to pretend that COVID isn’t really a problem. So he and his staff grasped for one rationalization after another. It’s confined to China. Ok, it’s in Europe, but we closed the borders, so we saved America through bold action. Ok, it’s in some American cities, but it’s not widespread, just a few cases. Ok, so there’s a lot of cases, but it’s not that serious, it’s just like the flu, no big deal. Ok, some people are dying, but they were really old and sick anyway. Ok, even some younger people are dying, but it’s all going to go away by Memorial Day. Ok, it’s not going away, but we’ve got some great treatments for it. Ok, so maybe you can’t inject bleach into your veins, but it’s confined to stupid Democratic cities anyway. Ok, so it’s showing up in red states, but whaddayagonna do? Masks don’t really work. Be a fucking man, don’t hide in your basement like that coward Joe Biden. And really, the best thing we can do is get to herd immunity quickly anyway, because we can’t shut things down until there’s a vaccine. Hey, there’s a vaccine! We totally made that happen, but the stupid liberal media won’t give us credit! Distribution problems? Don’t know what you’re talking about. The problem’s solved now.
So sure, it’s arrogance and stupidity and all those other things. But it’s also just an inexorable chain of “logic” once you start from the proposition that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can the economy be allowed to suffer. Of course, it turns out that (1) the economy is going to suffer anyway because some people prefer not to risk their lives; and (2) Trump could have benefitted, as other leaders did, from a huge rally-around-the-flag effect if he had demonstrated some baseline competence and concern. But then, they were never that smart.
Or, if he were a clever Putin or Orban type, he could have exploited the crisis to seize dictatorial powers far more effectively and less transparently than his current attempts to overturn the election.
That simple idea controls the political Right’s attitude to damn near everything: Covid-19, anthropogenic global warming, resource depletion. etc, etc, etc.
For example, from a leading journa on the Australian political Right:
Enough said.
.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/luvvieland/2020/12/how-to-deal-with-an-angry-wokester/
I guess that means not finding a way to tag on some tax cuts for the rich, abortion access restrictions, and deregulation of industry or banking.
Oh, fuck, that hits two of my beserk buttons:
1) Anyone who defends Trump has lost any standing to complain about someone else’s use of uncouth language.
2) I despise the phrase “potty-mouth.” It’s a word used either by or to children. Uttering that phrase to complain about someone else’s profanity merely confirms my beliefs that people who hyperventilate about “foul language” are either delicate little children, or condescending assholes who want to treat the rest of us as children. (You can absolutely complain about excessive or inappropriate use of profanity, but you can speak like a mature adult addressing another mature adult while you do so. Otherwise… how shall I put this? Fuck off.)
That is the Political Right’s first reaction to any situation: Covid-19, climate change, resource depletion, pollution, etc, etc, etc..
But on the bright side, there are career opportunities galore in the various schools opening up around these issues: The Ostrich School of Climatology, The Ostrich School of Epidemiology, The Ostrich School of Thermodynamics (no Second Laws allowed)… the list just keeps growing.