It is hard to imagine a national leader who is more ill-equipped to handle a national catastrophe than President Donald Trump:
- When the nation needs a team player, we’re led by a narcissist who has always put his needs first.
- When the nation needs someone who it can trust, it must listen to a leader who has lied publicly 7,000 times in the past three years.
- When the nation needs an Administration that values “expertness”, it is stuck with a President who makes impulsive decisions based upon his gut.
- When the nation needs mature leadership, it instead gets daily doses of juvenile insults targeted at perceived opponents, allies, and Administration teammates, alike.
- When the nation needs a President who can boldly and effectively address a crisis, we instead get a “leader” who refuses to acknowledge the crisis and takes no responsibility for his Administration’s sluggish performance.
The coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic collapse will impact this country for the next several decades, if not more. Heaven forbid that it is as impactful as The Great Depression.
Thank goodness, back in the late 20’s, the Thirties and the early Forties, that we had a leader as skillful and bold as Franklin Roosevelt running the show. As bad as times were, it could have been even worse.
I hate to say this, but I am fearful that this current mess could be/will be made worse by instinctive actions of Donald Trump.
The history of this man is rife with examples of extremely bad decisions based upon his gut instincts. Failed businesses, failed products, a failed charitable organization, a failed university, failed marriages, numerous incidents of philandering, evidence of serial sexual harassment, and use of the Presidency to extort foreign governments to help him get re-elected.
If there’s a fork in the road, Donald Trump’s instinct is always to take the wrong one, because all he thinks about is himself.
Our President failed to act early in the progression of the Covid-19 epidemic because he was afraid that it would damage the economy and, thus, his re-election prospects. His gut told him to project confidence and minimize the health threat. So, America lost valuable time, possibly as much as six weeks, to prepare for battle against the invisible enemy.
Now that the virus has hit America hard, the President is going through the motions of being a leader, but he continues to project doubt about the need for strict medical quarantine measures and the severity of the pandemic itself.
His gut tells him that the virus will burn itself out much quicker than the experts predict, and so he is itching to find an excuse to relax the “stay at home” restrictions. He keeps saying publicly that he wants to return workers to their jobs in a couple of weeks…before widespread testing is even in place and before the infection/death statistical curve has even been flattened.
We are early on in our fight against this coronavirus, yet our President’s instinct is to throw in the towel, pretend that it’s going to miraculously go away, and re-start the economy within a few weeks. Money has always been Mr. Trump’s key motivator, and it still is. Apparently, if he can get the cash registers singing again, he doesn’t care how many people get ill or die. As he said publicly yesterday, “The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”
A big problem right now is that no one knows how big the Covid-19 problem is, including our President. Testing for the virus is still not widely available (!). So, we don’t know who has the virus, and where they got it, and we don’t know who has had it and survived. (The latter are important because they now have some immunity and could, theoretically, go back to work.)
The infectious disease experts who are interviewed on this crisis have a uniform prediction: the epidemic in America is going to get worse before it gets better, and we, as a country, need to keep the quarantines in place, practice social distancing, start doing mass testing, and continue to do this for the next month, at least…and, then, see where we stand.
It is quite apparent that “the problem” crisis in Trump’s mind isn’t medical, it’s economic.
One of Trump’s Republican buddies, Texas’ Lt. Governor Dan Patrick argued in an interview last night on Fox News that the United States should go back to work, saying grandparents like him don’t want to sacrifice the country’s economy during the coronavirus crisis.
In other words, money is more important than people.
As skeptics of this approach note, if people simply go back to work, the epidemic will spread exponentially, and the entire health care apparatus of the United States will quickly become overloaded, leading to deaths in all age groups from all manner of injuries and diseases. It would be a medical as well as an economic catastrophe. Bottom line: there is no easy way out of this.
There is great consternation on Capitol Hill this week, as our Senate and House leadership attempt to craft a “bailout” bill that will ameliorate some of the immediate economic suffering of businesses and their employees. As usual, both political parties are posturing to get the best mileage out of the bill…in an election year, no less.
One stumbling block has been a provision in the Senate-crafted $ trillion bill that would give, pretty much carte-blanche authority for the President to spend $500 billion in business bailout funds any which way he desires.
The Democrats are wary of this so-called “slush fund”.
Some of Trump’s social buddies at Mar-a-Lago are the corporate big-shots in the cruise industry, one of a number of economic activities that have taken a gut punch. Of course, Trump’s hotel business in Florida benefits from tourism, and most cruises emanate from Florida ports. So, there’s the self-interest motive.
However, virtually all cruises involving American passengers (note: Americans constitute 75 percent of world cruise passengers) take place on ships that are not registered in the U.S. (to avoid taxes and our legal system) and virtually all of the employees are not U.S. citizens. Should President Trump have the authority to provide billions of bailout funds to the cruise industry…which is not an American industry…when tax-paying businesses and citizens in our own country are suffering?
The Democrats are wary of Trump’s gut instincts, and want the American public to know where the bailout money went…and why.
It would be helpful if our President would consider those inalienable rights that were guaranteed Americans in our Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Those apply to human beings…not corporations and businesses. Back in 1776, our Founding Fathers believed that human beings came first.
Unfortunately, we are stuck with a President, and a Republican Party, who think that business “trumps” people.