In the realm of politics right now, there may not be a more serious and necessary task than ensuring that the president is held to account for his grotesque mishandling of the U.S. response to the coronavirus threat, and that the Republican Party is also properly judged for its complicity in this disaster. As I wrote last week, in an utterly perverse way the president is somewhat shielded from a proper examination of his incompetence by the direct result of that incompetence: a growing deadly pandemic for which we are dangerously unprepared, and that has much of American locked down and anxious if not scared shitless. Yet it’s impossible to overstate the severity of the president’s offense: through his incompetence, many thousands, and potentially millions, more Americans will die from this virus than if the United States had had a competent and sane chief executive. To avoid grappling with this fact amounts to accepting that the president is free to allow the infliction of untold death and suffering on all of us, free of consequence. If we allow him to get away with this, there is literally no evil he and his allies will not hesitate to inflict on our country in the future.
Identifying the president’s mistakes is essential as a matter of basic accountability; the need to do so immediately, rather than after this crisis passes, is required in part because he has already embarked on a mission to rewrite the history of his culpability and to assign blame elsewhere. He had already told us that “I don’t take responsibility at all,” but now he’s also claiming that he was aware of the threat the pandemic posed from the start, and that he did everything necessary to stop it. These are bald-faced lies, but they are repeated not just by the president during his daily briefings and tweets, but by his political allies and right-wing propaganda outfits like Fox News. Likewise, he has embarked on a campaign to blame China for the virus as a way to evade responsibility for the botched federal response; he has also suggested that Latino immigrants have vectored the disease into America, with his administration issuing ominous warnings about how immigrants in holding facilities pose a threat to border agents. Opponents of Donald Trump cannot just assume that Americans will simply realize the truth of his culpability, not when there’s such a daily onslaught of distortion in defense of this president.
Nonetheless, even as Trump and his allies invoke racist defenses of their collective incompetence, damning facts continue to crash down on their heads like thunderbolts. The New York Times details a government exercise held last year that simulated a response to a theoretical pandemic eerily similar to the one we are now facing. The exercise revealed multiple shortcomings in U.S. preparations, including a realization that the U.S. “did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded” — problems that are facing us now in a moment of actual danger. At a minimum, the existence of this practice run gives the lie to the president’s statements that we couldn’t have predicted a pandemic like the present one.
Even more upsetting is this report from The Washington Post, which discusses how President Trump and other officials were privy to warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies as far back as January about the threat posed by the coronavirus, but that “[d]espite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.” As one source tells the Post, “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red.” It’s impossible to say if this particular official was aware of it, but the “blinking red” comments inevitably hearken back to descriptions of the warnings President Bush received prior to 9/11 and likewise ignored.
According to U.S. officials, a “key task for analysts during disease outbreaks is to determine whether foreign officials are trying to minimize the effects of an outbreak or take steps to hide a public health crisis.” In fact, some Trump advisers told him that the Chinese government was not being accurate in the coronavirus figures it was providing — yet the president essentially chose to believe the Chinese over his own intelligence agencies. Among other things, the president tweeted in late January that “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
The story also includes details that have been reported before, such as Trump’s reaction to CDC official Nancy Messonnier’s February 25 warning that coronavirus could result in “severe” disruptions to American life. The president complained to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Aazar that her comments were scaring the stock market; learning that he made these comments despite high-level warnings from intelligence sources that corroborated Messonnier’s perspective further cements a picture of a president determined to ignore the warnings of experts, and obsessed with maintaining a facade of normalcy.
For literally months leading up to this present crisis, the president made a fateful choice on a daily basis: faced with the prospect of a pandemic that threatened American lives, he chose a strategy of protecting his image over protecting Americans, and so refrained from the mobilization that would have protected countless lives. In doing so, he has lost any possible claim to authority in leading us through this crisis. Yet the same man who made this murderous calculation now appears before us almost daily, spreading lies and disinformation about U.S. efforts to combat this pandemic, both out of an ingrained incompetence and desperation to evade responsibility for his past bad decisions. Such a president will continue to derail the American effort against the virus, as he prioritizes a self-promoting worldview that downplays the threat of the coronavirus.
And so the point we have reached is both absurd and deeply sinister. As the death toll mounts and fear spikes across the land, Trump will have an increasing incentive to deflect responsibility from his own unforgivable mistakes, which will only magnify his incompetence and the danger to millions of Americans. To look away from his unfitness for office now is to make ourselves complicit in our own mass suffering. We need to be demanding his resignation, or, save that, his removal from any responsibility in fighting this epidemic.