America Was Sucker Punched By Our Own President In His Coronavirus Response

I have tried to keep the political out of this blog and to focus more on personal essays rather than opinion pieces. That's been a deliberate decision. I spent a lot of the mid-2000s as a political essayist and the bulk of my writing used to be advocacy journalism - yeah, it actually has a real name. I tried to be the blog version of a political columnist, offering analysis and opinion and trying to influence my readers. That's not what I want to do this time. I am looking more for a creative outlet that focuses more on narrative and observance. More on the personal.

But it's hard to deny that sometimes the personal is political. It would be wrong to publish articles and essays on life during a deadly pandemic while ignoring the political dimensions, especially the incredible way an unfit president has betrayed and weakened our country beyond recognition.

I am going to take it as a given that most of my readers agree with me that Trump was never a fit president. He never was presidential; never had the gravitas, knowledge base, or interest in developing it, for the job.

But nowhere has that been more apparent than now. Like others, I prayed we would not have a real crisis during Trump's administration. The crises I feared were terrorist attacks, economic downturns, security breaches. I never dreamed it would be a deadly pandemic that would go down in the books for being as deadly as the Pandemic of 1918.

Trump has always been impulsive, defiant, and disdainful of facts, evidence, and expertise. That has been well-documented. Indeed, it is why his followers voted him in. He was the big middle finger to all the elites and experts they perceived as looking down on them. I'm not sure their anger is entirely unjustified. It was those economic experts who minimized their pain at job losses as well-paying manufacturing jobs fled overseas, after all, with nothing coming into their communities to replace what they lost.

Bu it was also the middle finger to science that predicted the environmental depredations of global warming, a true crisis, and probably in part responsible for a rise in pandemics, among other ecological dangers.

So, with all that in mind, I am going to document, even though it's all information already out there in public, the ways Trump has mismanaged the response to the pandemic and how that has caused incredible suffering and death, some of which could have been avoided.

First, let me say, as others have, Trump is not responsible for the pandemic. But he bears large responsibility for how badly mismanaged it has been.

Indeed, some of the lack of foresight goes back to 2018, as this Vox article shows, when his administration dismantled the White House team in charge of pandemic response, which had been set up under the Obama administration in response to an earlier outbreak of Ebola in 2014.

It began in April 2018 — more than a year and a half before the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, Covid-19, sickened enough people in China that authorities realized they were dealing with a new disease.

The Trump administration, with John Bolton newly at the helm of the White House National Security Council, began dismantling the team in charge of pandemic response, firing its leadership and disbanding the team in spring 2018.

The cuts, coupled with the administration’s repeated calls to cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health agencies, made it clear that the Trump administration wasn’t prioritizing the federal government’s ability to respond to disease outbreaks.

That lack of attention to preparedness, experts say, helps explain why the Trump administration has consistently botched its response to the coronavirus pandemic.

And botched is actually a kind way of putting it.

This pandemic did not hit us suddenly and without warning. Far from it. The outbreak began in Wuhan, China at the end of December. To be sure, at the beginning, the Chinese Communist government hid the true nature of the emerging and mysterious illness and downplayed its deadliness. China was slow to share any of its information, and I believe when this is over, they must be held accountable on the world stage for their role in its deadly spread.

But by early January, our intelligence community was reporting to the White House that a new disease was emerging and we needed to start planning for what could be a deadly outbreak. Trump, time and again, showed little interest.

Instead of beefing up our national stockpile of emergency medical supplies and equipment, Trump ignored the threat. And as the deadly virus began spreading beyond China, Trump continued to downplay it all the way up until the end of March.

By early March, when Italy's healthcare system was collapsing and their death tolls were reaching shocking levels, Trump was assuring his followers that they had nothing to worry about. He was calling the virus a hoax - as he does all bad news. Among his dumb statements was one promising that one day, when it warmed up, the virus would be gone, "like a miracle."

He resisted early calls for shutting down nonessential business, social distancing, and closing schools and government buildings. And when he finally bowed to a reality that could no longer be denied, he did so grudgingly and still sending mixed messages. On the one hand, yes, he finally, far too late, urged states to shut down nonessential business, only to reverse himself and insist they should reopen by April 12, He wanted churches filled for Easter - a nod and dog whistle to his fact and evidence-challenged evangelical base.

Even now, he holds daily public briefings, surrounded by two of the most respected infectious disease specialists and public health experts, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, only to undercut their advice. And he keeps pushing unproven and possibly dangerous remedies like chloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment for Covid-19.

This is only a brief description of the panic, denial, and dysfunction that has emerged as the administration's response to a modern day plague. The Washington Post has a detailed description of of all that has been botched.

 Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.  

It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus.

Not only should we have been best prepared, we actually had the most warning. This originated in China. Cases were popping up throughout Asia. We had a window to what was working in countries like South Korea and Singapore, where early, aggressive testing, contact tracing, and acting quickly to quarantine infected people limited the spread of disease and saved lives. Indeed, we also saw the terrible results of failing to act quickly when Italy's healthcare system became overwhelmed.

We watched for about three weeks as the situation in Northern Italy's most prosperous region became the site of stacked up body bags, shortages of ventilators and mounting death counts. A group of doctors from Italy got together and issued a public letter pleading with the rest of the world to take aggressive measures quickly to avoid their fate, becoming a charnel house

Even as that was unfolding, Trump was in denial, underplaying the threat, cracking jokes, and urging people to ignore warnings. Meanwhile, the CDC had botched development of accurate tests, For weeks after it finally sank in with all but the densest that we were fast sinking, the CDC was so short on tests that they were denying sick people needed testing. Their guidance was ridiculous. Ignoring obvious virus symptoms, their criteria was only the most serious of cases with known contact with other covid-19 patients could be tested. People showing up in ERs were denied tests and often sent home and told to simply self quarantine and self care.

This lack of testing, by the way, will continue to hamper our efforts to recover. With lack of accurate data about true infection rates, how will we even know for certain when it's receding and ending the shutdowns is safe? The truth is, we have so severely under counted the number of cases that an accurate count and successful recovery is probably impossible. We may well end up back at square one with even higher death counts later when we all come back out, possibly too quickly, because we simply don't know what we don't know. Absent adequate data, effective public health policy is impossible.

Here's another example of the CDC's flubbed response. For weeks, CDC guidelines were to not wear masks in public because, according to the CDC, they did not protect against covid-19. But contradicting themselves, they said masks were needed by health care workers to protect them. Of course, in a shortage, those at the front line caring for the sick need all the protective gear, including medical grade masks. But the CDC insisting they weren't protective except when they were, didn't earn them any credibility. And it only confused an already mistrustful public.

Never mind the question of why there was such a dire shortage of masks and gowns for hospital workers and other first responders in the first place. The obvious fact is masks do, in fact, offer some protection. At very least, along with social distancing, they keep an infected person from spreading their germs to healthy people. And they offer some protection - again, along with distancing - to healthy people by at least slowing down the spread of droplets and maybe lowering the viral load a healthy person is exposed to.

A few days ago Dr. Birx admitted as much and CDC guidelines on this were reversed. They were honest that medical grade masks should be reserved for hospital staff because there was a shortage. But, yes, everybody venturing out should use some homemade face covering.

In all this, from the very top, starting with the president, to his political appointees to the CDC there has been a botched effort. From emergency preparedness to early response, to a coherent message and effective policy everything has been fumbled and mismanaged.

Americans deserve better. And absent that better, we deserve a deep dive when this is done so we are never caught so unprepared or badly served again.