National Review: President Trump Needs to Step Up on the Coronavirus
Good. Even the rethugs recognize what a failure he is.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/president-trump-needs-to-step-up-on-the-coronavirus/
President Trump Needs to Step Up on the Coronavirus
By The Editors
March 10, 2020 2:00 PM
snip//
At the same time, however, it is important that the president’s defenders not be blinded by partisanship of their own into excusing failures of leadership and diminishing the danger of the epidemic itself. This can be particularly difficult because some of the most significant inadequacies of the administration have been the president’s own. So far in this crisis, Donald Trump himself has obviously failed to rise to the challenge of leadership, and it does no one any favors to pretend otherwise.
The disastrous missteps involved in the effort to make testing kits available nationwide are not the president’s own. They are the fault of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they represent a serious scientific, technical, and bureaucratic failure for which the appropriate officials should be held responsible. But those problems are clearly being corrected now, and there is every reason to think testing kits will soon be available to all who need them.
The failures of leadership at the top, however, show no sign of being corrected. In a serious public-health crisis, the public has the right to expect the government’s chief executive to lead in a number of crucial ways: by prioritizing the problem properly, by deferring to subject-matter experts when appropriate while making key decisions in informed and sensible ways, by providing honest and careful information to the country, by calming fears and setting expectations, and by addressing mistakes and setbacks.
Trump so far hasn’t passed muster on any of these metrics. He resisted making the response to the epidemic a priority for as long as he could — refusing briefings, downplaying the problem, and wasting precious time. He has failed to properly empower his subordinates and refused to trust the information they provided him — often offering up unsubstantiated claims and figures from cable television instead. He has spoken about the crisis in crude political and personal terms. He has stood in the way of public understanding of the plausible course of the epidemic, trafficking instead in dismissive clichés. He has denied his administration’s missteps, making it more difficult to address them.
This presidential behavior is all too familiar. It is how he has gotten through scandals and fiascos for more than three years in office. But those were all essentially political in nature, and most were self-created. The country has been lucky in the Trump era, largely avoiding the sorts of major, unforeseen crises that make the greatest demands of the modern presidency. That luck has now run out, and this demands a new level of seriousness from the president and those around him.
President Trump needs to rise to this challenge. His partisan adversaries are sure he can’t. We hope he proves them wrong.
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