A Plan of No Plan

Ezra Klein published a really excellent and deeply disturbing piece at Vox yesterday (link here) with the title "We don’t have a President or a plan" and the secondary title of "60 days into the coronavirus crisis, the White House does not have a plan, a framework, a philosophy, or a goal."

These two paragraphs sum up his thesis:

"More than 60 days after [Donald] Trump declared a national emergency over the novel coronavirus, there is still no clear national plan for what comes next. 'The lockdown is not meant to be a permanent state of affairs; it’s intended to be a giant pause button that buys you time to get ready for the next phase,' Jeremy Konyndyk, of the Center for Global Development think tank, says."

"But the Trump administration wasted the pause. Over the past two months, the US should have built the testing, contact tracing, and quarantine infrastructure necessary to safely end lockdown and transition back to normalcy — as many of its peer countries did. Instead, Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job. He has both dominated the airwaves and abdicated his duties. As a result, America’s progress against the coronavirus has stalled, even as the lockdown has driven the economy into crisis."

And then he goes for the kill: "It is the most profound and complete failure of presidential leadership in modern history."

That is why we cannot afford a second Trump term. Read this piece, please, and share with everyone you know who might be receptive.