'NYT Investigation Finds Trump Admin. Was Desperate To Shift Blame For Covid Crisis,' Dr. Birx
"NYTimes investigation finds Trump administration was desperate to shift blame for a crisis of its own creation." Written by Daily Kos, July 19, 2020, AlterNet.
Conducting over two dozen interviews with senior administration and public health officials, and consulting a cache of previously unavailable documents, the New York Times has uncovered what now seems obvious to everyone except perhaps Trump’s dwindling and ignorant base of supporters: the Trump administration deliberately sought to shift blame for its botched handling of the Covid-19 pandemic to the states, in what the Times authors aptly characterize as a “catastrophic policy blunder” and “one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.”
A team in the White House led by President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, met daily on the crisis, but the ultimate goal was shifting responsibility. “They referred to this as ‘state authority handoff,’ and it was at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country- perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations,” write Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger.
Other than Trump himself, two of the officials taking a lead role in causing this catastrophe, according to the Times, were Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Coronavirus Task Force leader Deborah Birx. Birx’s role in delivering deliberately upbeat information to Trump (in the face of dire negative news directly to the contrary) played a major role in Trump’s decision-making, according to the Times, which refers to her as the “chief evangelist” portraying the threat from the virus as “fading.” (The Times article in fact contains an entire, devastating segment explicating Birx’s influence on the policy; she declined to be interviewed for the article).
For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group.
A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.
As late as April 11, Birx was telling Trump that the “nation was in good shape,” while Meadows was casting the handling of the crisis in ideological terms, as an issue that the states should handle, rather than the federal government. Birx was also largely instrumental in developing a plan that shunted responsibility for the pandemic away from the federal government and onto the cash-strapped states. Not surprisingly, these were the exact types of messages guaranteed to please Trump (who from Times investigation was clearly too uninterested and self-absorbed to interpret any data himself).
Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown...
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/nytimes-investigation-finds-trump-administration-was-desperate-to-shift-blame-for-a-crisis-of-its-own-creation/
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