Throwing in the Towel

Last night, the Washington Post published an excellent but disturbing — and detailed — article (link here) about how Donald Trump and his White House have just given up trying to solve the coronavirus crisis.

It opens with how Trump's chief of staff doesn't even bother trying to plan for attacking the problem. The chief "no longer holds a daily 8 a.m. meeting that includes health professionals to discuss the raging pandemic. Instead, aides said, he huddles in the mornings with a half-dozen politically oriented aides — and when the virus comes up, their focus is more on how to convince the public that Trump has the crisis under control, rather than on methodically planning ways to contain it."

So their whole focus is on how to spin a web of lies rather than actually addressing the dire situation.

The piece moves on to detail about how the White House is in an anti-science stranglehold. The chief "is not alone in being skeptical of medical expertise, part of the politics-first, science-second attitude that has become pervasive inside the White House this summer — and which has been championed foremost by Trump."

That led the White House in June to attempt to focus attention away from the escalating disaster. "Under mounting pressure to improve the President’s reelection chances as his poll numbers declined, the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across the country."

That would be like planning a music concert on the Titanic hours after the ship hit the iceberg and had begun to list badly. All they worry about is Trump's reelection. Fuck the people getting sick and dying.

Obviously, magical thinking is rampant in the administration. "Trump and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will dissipate on its own."

As a result, Trump and his administration are drifting aimlessly because they have yet to grasp a fundamental truth: "Nearly seven months after the first coronavirus case was reported in the United States, there still is no national strategy to contain the outbreak."

The reason for this, first and foremost, is because of the man behind the desk in the Oval Office. "In Trump’s White House, there is little process that guides decision-making on the pandemic. The President has been focused first and foremost on his reelection chances and reacting to the daily or hourly news cycle as opposed to making long-term strategy, with [the chief of staff] and other senior aides indulging his impulses rather than striving to impose discipline."

This article alone proves why Trump must be defeated at the ballot box in November. He's completely lost about how to be a President. He's focusing entirely on the showmanship while utterly ignoring the real requirements of the job.