BTRTN: While Trump Slept
Born To Run The Numbers' monthly review for March is a detailed review of Trump's epic failure in handling the coronavirus crisis.
http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2020/04/btrtn-while-trump-slept.html
Excerpts: "Yet for those six weeks, Trump was a skeptic and refused to lead the fight – and even when he became a grudging convert on March 17, he refused to act decisively to coordinate a national response. Someday historians will compare Trump to Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain knew that Germany was rearming in the 1930’s. And there were plenty warning him, including Winston Churchill, who frequently and forcefully articulated the threat as he was sidelined from government. Chamberlain calculated that, given the all-too-fresh scars left by the death of nearly a million young British men in World War I, UK citizens would not stand for rearmament and another war. He chose to appease Hitler. Had he rallied the UK to the threat and driven through a rearmament plan equal to the challenge, he might not have lost another near-half million young men in World War II. Any introductory management course tells you that the best action is to plan for the worst, and only hope for the best --- not the other way around...
"Trump was in denial. He did not rally the nation. He did not command factories to meet the demand for face masks and ventilators, not even using “war power” authority after he received it. He did not exhort the nation to adopt social distancing and proper hygiene – indeed, he continued to hold mega-MAGA rallies, shook hands even as he stood behind a podium with the Coronavirus Task Force , and failed to keep his senior aides, in plain view of America, six feet apart. And most importantly, he took no national, decisive action as his counterparts in the Far East and across Europe had done, failing to shut down America when it would have helped the most..."
"This ongoing denial, and unwillingness to lead and to act, had and has consequences. If Trump had managed to keep the US curve in line with Italy, we would have one-third the cases we do now. That is, we would be at roughly 65,000 cases, not more than 200,000."