With the novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, sweeping the planet and beginning to spread through the U.S., questions over the effectiveness of the federal government have again jumped into the limelight. President Donald Trump and his team have proven that they do not have the faintest idea how to manage a crisis, and the American population is going to suffer the consequences.
Trump’s main issue, as always, is information. Namely, his inability to stop tweeting inaccurate, confusing and sometimes contradictory information about the virus and the effects it will have on the American public.
On Monday, the president tweeted, “Saudi Arabia and Russia are arguing over the price and flow of oil. That, and the Fake News, is the reason for the market drop!” in reference to the absolutely abysmal Monday morning that saw the New York Stock Exchange engage a “circuit breaker” that paused trading for 15 minutes.
Not only is this another case of Trump focusing on a wholly unrepresentative aspect of the American economy, but it is also another case of him blaming everything except the actual cause of the problem. Oil prices dropped because demand for oil dropped, because the global economy has slowed down tremendously due to the virus. China, the world’s main producer of consumer goods, has closed a majority of its manufactories because of the disease, which means less oil burned for energy, less gas used to transport those goods and to procure raw resources.
Also on Monday, he tweeted that “at this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths.” Anyone with an internet connection can tell you this tweet was at the very least imprecise. Nationally, as of Sunday, there are more than 550 confirmed cases of the virus, with 22 deaths, but internationally more than 108,000 people are infected, and there have been 3,800 deaths.
Democratic presidential hopeful Mike Bloomberg, who thankfully dropped out last week, accused Trump of firing the pandemic team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2018 and defunding the organization. That was mostly a lie. The pandemic team leadership resigned in 2018 and Trump never replaced them.
While the administration’s budget proposals have routinely slashed funding for the CDC, Congress has never allowed those cuts to go through, and has actually increased the CDC’s funding for programs to manage emerging infectious diseases.
The real issue here is his leadership, not his positions. There are no “good people on all sides” with this problem, only success in protecting the population or failure. Failure means deaths, and a lot of them.
If Trump does not wise up to the reality that the coronavirus is a disease worthy of his concern, and stop spreading half truths and false comforts, what could be a relatively standard infectious disease response may become a national crisis of unparalleled significance.
