Ezra Klein has come out and stated outright what we’ve been seeing before our very eyes for months now, but which has been sometimes hard to perceive because of its sheer irresponsibility, stupidity, and casual indifference to mass death: the Trump administration simply has no plan or goals around fighting the coronavirus pandemic. He notes that the nation-wide lockdowns over the last two months were supposed to buy the country time to implement plans, during which period
the US should have built the testing, contact tracing, and quarantine infrastructure necessary to safely end lockdown and transition back to normalcy — as many of its peer countries did. Instead, Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job. He has both dominated the airwaves and abdicated his duties. As a result, America’s progress against the coronavirus has stalled, even as the lockdown has driven the economy into crisis.
Much of the current public debate is posed as one “between endless lockdown or reckless reopening,” but Klein correctly notes that this dichotomy is due to “the failure to create a safer, middle path,” identifying this as “the most profound and complete failure of presidential leadership in modern history.” As the title of Klein’s piece puts it, “we have no president.”
Klein’s assessment is clarifying, in that it redeems the maddening feeling I’ve had for weeks now that we have entered more and more into a phase of “re-opening” without actually doing the things (beyond enduring the lockdown) that would make this anything of a good idea. Yes, states have been taking individual and sometimes collective actions like increased testing and implementation of tracing programs — but overall, the sensation has been that we are prematurely starting to return to normal without much of the infrastructure in place needed to stop fresh waves of the coronavirus in the coming months or even weeks. According to Klein — and really, according to the known facts — this sensation is an accurate perception of reality. We really are careening forward without a clear map, and this does seem to me to be indistinguishable from a form of madness. It is a madness directly informed by the way the president has translated his personal sociopathy into governmental non-action — but it’s also a madness amplified by our collective inability to grapple with the basic fact of his de facto resignation from the role of president. Donald Trump has no interest in protecting American lives, and anyone who thinks otherwise at this point is either a devoted partisan or naïve beyond belief — yet at some basic, gut level, we collectively keep acting as if he does care. To always expect him to act otherwise is to enter into a complementary form of madness (maybe mass delusion is a better, more specific term), in which we expect something from Trump that he is unable to provide.
But though the president has no plan for fighting the coronavirus, the president does very much have a plan for the coronavirus more generally. This plan, none of us should be surprised to learn, is focused on the protection and preservation of Donald Trump’s political and economic fortunes. In retrospect, he has never really done very much to hide this plan. In his obsession with the nation’s economic health and simultaneous indifference to its actual health, the plan has always been to downplay the coronavirus and convince the American people that it’s not nearly as big a threat as they might otherwise believe. This was his approach in the earliest days, when he spoke of the virus being contained to a handful of Americans before inevitably going away, to his early mystical phase of promising that the virus would disappear on its own, to his attempts to downplay the death toll by comparing it to the cost of car accidents or the common flu. Once the death toll began to rise and it was clear that he had squandered the months of January and February, continued denial became the only path forward, because anything else would mean acknowledging his prior mistakes — which, as we all know, he does not do, because he cannot admit a mistake, and because he never wants to actually accept the responsibilities of his office. He is only in it for himself. That has always been the master plan, and it always will be.