🚨The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life | US news | The Guardian theguardian.com/us-news/2020/m…
Responses by US & S. Korea have been opposites. 1 acted swiftly to detect & isolate the virus, & has largely contained crisis. The other dithered & procrastinated, mired in chaos & confusion, distracted by whims of its leader, & is confronted by emergency of daunting proportions.
Within a week of 1st confirmed case, S. Korea’s summoned 20 companies to a war-planning summit & told them to develop a test for virus at lightning speed. A week later, 1st diagnostic test was approved, identifying infected individuals to be quarantined to halt advance of disease
The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
Those missing 4-6 weeks will go down in definitive history as cautionary tale of potentially devastating consequences of failed political leadership. Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”
White House had all the information it needed by the end of January to act decisively. Instead, Trump repeatedly played down severity of threat, blamed China for “Chinese virus” & insisted falsely that partial travel bans on China & Europe were all it would take to contain crisis
The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.
🚨 In 2018 the pandemic unit in the NSC, tasked to prepare for health emergencies, was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up.
Disbanding the unit exacerbated a trend already prevalent after 2 years of Trump – an exodus of skilled & experienced officials who knew what they were doing. “There’s been an erosion of expertise, of competent leadership, at important levels of government.”
It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.
On 30 January, as the World Health Organization was declaring a global emergency, Trump said: “We only have five people. Hopefully, everything’s going to be great.”
On 24 February, Trump claimed “coronavirus is very much under control in the USA”. The next day, Nancy Messonnier, CDC’s top official on respiratory diseases, took the radically different approach of telling the truth, warning that “disruption to everyday life might be severe”.
Trump was reportedly so angered by the comment & impact on share prices that he shouted at Messonnier’s boss, the secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar. Trump angrily rebuked her department. That sent a very clear message about what is and isn’t permissible to say.
When governors begged Trump to unleash the full might of the government on the problem, he gave an answer on March 16 that will stand as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”
“We are seeing the emergence of 50-state anarchy, because of a total vacuum of federal leadership. It’s absurd that thinktanks and Twitter are providing more actionable guidance in the US than the federal government, but that’s where we are.”
