It has taken a good deal longer than it should have,
but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.
When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump,
even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled.
How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?
What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally
and psychologically—for office.
For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis
—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.
“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago.
“No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.”
I added this:
Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency;
it could very well lead to national catastrophe.
The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.
It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president
who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.
These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security.
What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it.
Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.
“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up.
You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration
and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post.
“To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”
Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity has
been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus.
“It is failing.
Let’s admit it.” He added,
“The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily,
the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that.
I think it should be, but we’re not.”
We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused,
(Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)
But that’s not all.
The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable.
The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics;
we’re now paying the price for that.
“We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress.
“It would be nice if the office was still there.”
We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate
anything like that in countries such as Italy.
(This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)
He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading.
He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not.
He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t.
He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”;
it won’t.
He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months;
Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more
Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing.
He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did.
(He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.)
The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse.
And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast
rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.
“I like the numbers,” Trump said.
“I would rather have the numbers stay where they are.
But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off.
But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.”
(Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)
On and on it goes.
To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both.
The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted;
worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies,
which the administration had to correct.
Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech.
In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee
as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it.
As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it,
“Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”
the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,”
in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of TheNew York Times.
Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th
president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.
The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged.
He knows nothing will be the same.
His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell.
The Trump presidency is over.
####
####
smallstepsgiantstrides.net 
You must be logged in to post a comment.