This Is Trump’s Fault
The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures
don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the
Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph
of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.
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Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going?
By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the
9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may
have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present
trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam.
Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump
now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.
The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying,
and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably
developed country.
Read: How the pandemic will end
That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter
unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The
loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal
government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national
arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states
for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for
ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That
was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault
again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure
to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is
more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could
have stopped it, and he did not. More by David Frum
Donald Trump various faces
Trump Has Lost the Plot
David Frum
Michael Flynn
The Secrets Flynn Was Desperate to Conceal
David Frum
A demonstrator in Maryland protesting the state's closures
Trump Brings Religion Into the Coronavirus Culture War
David Frum
The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative
talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope
of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he
told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of
the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if
he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser
and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips
were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact
that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by
mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical
supply chain? Trump’s fault.
For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way
through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or
later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be
evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed
Trump.
Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.
The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump
administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed
in mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the
first of a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to
have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in
the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By
March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its
first large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin
marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks
between January 3 and March 21.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there
was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered,
because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost
weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth.
Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the
path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory.
Statisticians cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the
accelerating economic depression. It’s a good guess that the
unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great
Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer.
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