Consider the following excerpt:
"Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a 'deep state.' In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored."
"Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, 'so that when something like this happens, you’re moving quickly,' Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. 'By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken.' Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there."
"Travel bans make intuitive sense, because travel obviously enables the spread of a virus. But in practice, travel bans are woefully inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trump’s included numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later announced a ban on flights from continental Europe, a surge of travelers packed America’s airports in a rush to beat the incoming restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of an epidemic—not stop it. And they can create a harmful false confidence, so countries 'rely on bans to the exclusion of the things they actually need to do—testing, tracing, building up the health system,' says Thomas Bollyky, a global-health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'That sounds an awful lot like what happened in the U.S.'"
"This was predictable. A President who is fixated on an ineffectual border wall, and has portrayed asylum seekers as vectors of disease, was always going to reach for travel bans as a first resort. And Americans who bought into his rhetoric of xenophobia and isolationism were going to be especially susceptible to thinking that simple entry controls were a panacea."
"And so the U.S. wasted its best chance of restraining Covid‑19. Although the disease first arrived in the U.S. in mid-January, genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t land until mid-February. The country could have used that time to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that 'the coronavirus is very much under control,' and 'like a miracle, it will disappear.' With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread."
"On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were 'going to be down to close to zero.' Over the next two months, at least one million Americans were infected."
And now, of course, more than five million Americans have been infected. The death toll is closing in on 170,000.
The article makes painfully clear how Trump is the worst possible President for a crisis of this sort. Not only does he have zero administrative experience, his habitual dishonesty and crippling narcissism has compounded that lack of experience many times over.
The piece is not short, but I strongly recommend reading. If you'd rather listen to the article being read by a professional actor in audio format, you can download a free copy of that recording here.
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