The Washington Post has a report out on the background to Donald Trump’s disastrous coronavirus policy speech last Wednesday. Paragraph for paragraph, it’s one of the most damning and enraging portraits of the White House I’ve read in . . . well, in at least a few weeks. We learn that presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner attempted to take the lead on the coronavirus response, employing such novel methods as taking crowdsourced Facebook suggestions from an in-law. As with the president, Kushner’s main goal seems not to have been to organize a response to protect the American people, but rather arrive at the right combination of words and hocus-pocus that might arrest the stock market’s precipitous fall as it reflects the reality of a fucked economy.
The article describes a White House in which the president’s re-election is the pre-eminent concern, and where advisors’ fear of being accused of disloyalty stifles discussion. It helps clarify that this president and his staff are simply overmatched by the current crisis, unable to see beyond the narrow range of the president’s personal interests. The processes inside the White House are chaotic and unfocused, and not equal to the gravity of this moment; as the president conducts free for alls in the Oval Office, his advisors apparently spend a great deal of energy in absurd rivalries. Meanwhile, others tell the Post that “they have to spend significant chunks of their day dealing with leaks, especially as officials try to escape blame for the testing issues that have plagued the administration’s response for weeks.”
As hard as it is to stomach, this article did at least clarify something which really should have been more obvious to me long before now: that the president has absolutely no conception of actually being the president. There appears to be a complete and total separation in his mind — a separation reflected in the attitudes of those around him — between serving the American people as he was elected to do, and seeking re-election to the highest office in the land. He is obsessed with the latter, and sees his path to success in manipulating reality in such a way that he fools enough people into voting for him. Even in the midst of an epidemic in which his actions can mean the difference between life and death for millions of Americans, re-election is the paramount interest. For the vast majority of anyone who might be in his place, the choice would be obvious, to the point that it would be no choice at all: you would do everything in your power to protect the American people, and let the election sort itself out. Indeed, any rational president would have to acknowledge that personal failure in handling this outbreak would rightly be considered disqualifying — after all, what’s the point of being president if you’re just getting people killed?
At this point, to expect any sort of competent response from this president and this White House is not just nonsensical, it’s delusional. We need to disabuse ourselves of our natural instinct to think that the same solidarity and empathy we feel for other Americans must be shared by the monster in the White House. Trump has surrounded himself with people who reflect and amplify his own tremendous personal failings, making the White House as a whole a fusion reactor of self-interest, greed, white nationalism, and ineptness. The vast majority of Americans simply do no matter to him.
Meanwhile, the president’s failings are perfectly complemented by the political beliefs of the Republican Party, which has spent the past four decades denigrating and degrading our government’s ability to act for the collective good, including to protect us from a pandemic like the one we are facing. Together, the president’s personal incompetence and the GOP’s ideological irrelevance make this into a horrifying crisis for the rest of us. We are going to see thousands if not millions of our fellow citizens die because these incompetents long ago stopped believing in a democratic government that serves everyone, and started seeing government as just a mechanism to help funnel money and power to an increasingly narrow band at the top of American society.