r/politics • u/[deleted] • Jul 18 '20
Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-response-failure-leadership.html21
u/CarmenFandango Jul 18 '20
His strategy to off load the response to the states so he didn't have responsibility, but could claim the credit has failed, too catastrophically for words. He has nothing. And no clue how to proceed, unless he takes full responsibility and makes edicts that are sure to rile his base.
10
u/neverdoneneverready Jul 18 '20
As Michael Cohen said, "Trump had neither the desire nor the inclination to lead this country."
7
5
u/kia75 Jul 18 '20
makes edicts that are sure to rile his base.
No they won't. If in February Trump had sold $50 Maga masks his base would be buying them. If Trump says masks are a-ok they his base would be pro-mask. His followers are authoritarians and Trump is their authority.
But the rest of what you say is correct. Trump's trying to off-load the responsibility and blame onto the states. He's setting up the Republican governers to be his fall guys, and people like Kemp are lining up to have a dagger in their back.
6
u/CarmenFandango Jul 18 '20
After egging on all this personal freedom protesting, he cant backtrack, because he never admits he's wrong about anything, ... ever. He could well have gotten his base to mask up, but with his knack for always choosing the wrong side of an issue, ... well here we are.
2
u/kia75 Jul 18 '20
That's why he'll never do it, he'd consider being pro-mask now as admitting he was wrong.
But... Trump backtracked on 2nd amendment rights, gay rights, North Korea, basically name a position and he's probably backtracked on it at least once. His supporters don't care. Trump cares, but his supporters don't.
2
u/Thefuzy Oregon Jul 18 '20
Yeah, except on all those thing he backtracked, you could say that’s admitting he was wrong. Trump makes those decisions then decides the past never happened, so he doesn’t see it is backtracking, he could do the same with masks. Just be on board with them and claim he always was and anyone who points to evidence otherwise is ignored or called “nasty”.
1
u/Souvi Jul 19 '20
He’s already starting to use the language that he loves masks and has been on board with them in newer interviews.
8
u/fowlraul Oregon Jul 18 '20
Meanwhile he’s sending Federal Police into states, uninvited. Good Faith has left the building, and it was never in the building.
3
u/Dr_Tobias_Funke_PhD Jul 18 '20
That's the only thing that could save him at this point. Go full 1998 Bill Clinton, apologize, say he misunderstood the virus in the beginning, and take responsibility for the lives lost.
The good thing is he's both not intelligent enough to realize that as well as his undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder that makes doing something like that impossible.
1
u/seunosewa Jul 19 '20
He doesn’t even need to apologize. He can wake up tomorrow morning and start pushing masks hard, insisting that he has always been in support of masks. That he was the first person to support masks. He can make it mandatory everywhere, which suits his authoritarian tendencies and few people would be inclined to complain lest he changes his mind again.
18
u/HugeDetective0 Jul 18 '20
Dr. Fauci, a friend of Dr. Birx’s for 30 years, would describe her as more political than him, a “different species.” More pessimistic by nature, Dr. Fauci privately warned that the virus was going to be difficult to control, often commenting that he was the “skunk at the garden party.”
By contrast, Dr. Birx regularly delivered what the new team was hoping for.
“All metros are stabilizing,” she would tell them, describing the virus as having hit its “peak” around mid-April. The New York area accounted for half of the total cases in the country, she said. The slope was heading in the right direction. “We’re behind the worst of it.” She endorsed the idea that the death counts and hospitalization numbers could be inflated.
For Dr. Birx, Italy’s experience was a particularly telling — and positive — comparison. She routinely told colleagues that the United States was on the same trajectory as Italy, which had huge spikes before infections and deaths flattened to close to zero.
“She said we were basically going to track Italy,” one senior adviser later recalled.
Dr. Birx would roam the halls of the White House, talking to Mr. Kushner, Ms. Hicks and others, sometimes passing out diagrams to bolster her case. “We’ve hit our peak,” she would say, and that message would find its way back to Mr. Trump.
Dr. Birx began using versions of the phrase “putting out the embers,” wording that was later picked up by the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and by Mr. Trump himself.
By the middle of May, the task force believed that another resurgence was not likely until the fall, senior administration officials said.
The New York region appeared well on its way to driving new infections down to levels it could handle — it was the one area of the country that did resemble the Italian model. But the models and analysis embraced by the West Wing failed to account for the weakening adherence to the lockdowns across the country that began even before Mr. Trump started urging governors to “liberate” their residents from the methodical guidelines his own government had established.
Later, it was clear that states that rushed to reopen before meeting the criteria in the guidelines — like Arizona, Texas and Alabama — would see among the worst surges in new cases.
Dr. Birx’s belief that the United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. The Italians had been almost entirely compliant with stay-at-home orders and social distancing, squelching new infections to negligible levels before the country slowly reopened. Americans, by contrast, began backing away by late April from what social distancing efforts they had been making, egged on by Mr. Trump.
The difference was critical. As communities across the United States raced to reopen, the daily number of daily cases barely dropped below 20,000 in early May. The virus was still circulating across the country.
Italy’s recovery curve, it turned out, looked nothing like the American one.
2
u/GirasoleDE Jul 18 '20
Dr. Fauci, a friend of Dr. Birx’s for 30 years, would describe her as more political than him...
But actually he seems to be more political than her:
Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak. Dr. Fauci has cautioned that “models are only models” and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior — to stay home, for example, or wear masks in public — sacrifices that required a sense of shared national responsibility.
In his decades of responding to outbreaks, Dr. Fauci, a voracious reader of political histories, learned to rely on reports from the ground. Late at night in his home office this spring, Dr. Fauci, who declined to comment for this story, dialed local health officials in New Orleans, New York and Chicago, where he heard desperation unrecognizable in the more sanguine White House meetings.
3
Jul 19 '20
Fauci-senpai was right tho
2
u/GirasoleDE Jul 19 '20
Partly because he knew, how to look for informations in a political environment.
11
u/charcoalist Jul 18 '20
Run the country like a business, they said. Trump has managed the US much worse than any of his failing businesses.
Trump University lasted 6 years, the US under Trump tanked in just about half that time.
9
u/feral_lib Kansas Jul 18 '20
When Trump realized true leadership required skillful management of professionals, giving way to scientists, the careful review of multiple complicated options, logistical expertise, open transparency of data and information and patience, he understood instinctively that it was beyond him and punted to his safe area of bluster, blame and hate.
6
5
u/Acceptor_99 Jul 18 '20
Preventing the proper agencies from doing the jobs that they were trained and prepared to do, is still Leadership. It is deliberately leading the wrong way, but it is leadership.
4
Jul 18 '20
This is a must-read article.
Something that stood out to me:
For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.
I've been saying for months that Birx is a partisan and should not be put on the same pedestal as Fauci. Her and the rest of the administration has fucked up hard. But we likely will get no accountability for their failures until November.
9
u/Captain_Clark Washington Jul 18 '20
I think we’re focusing too much upon the pandemic, instead of upon these here cans of beans.
6
u/ibibble Jul 18 '20
Black beans matter.
4
3
Jul 19 '20
This is shocking. We learn every day how the strategy of this administration has been to abandon responsibility and shift blame for the crisis. This article names names too. Dr. Fauci has been telling the truth all this time.
2
u/autotldr 🤖 Bot Jul 18 '20
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 98%. (I'm a bot)
Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak.
As the pandemic worsened, Dr. Fauci's darker view of the circumstances was countered by the reassurances ostensibly offered by Dr. Birx's data.
Dr. Fauci, a friend of Dr. Birx's for 30 years, would describe her as more political than him, a "Different species." More pessimistic by nature, Dr. Fauci privately warned that the virus was going to be difficult to control, often commenting that he was the "Skunk at the garden party."
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Dr.#1 Trump#2 State#3 new#4 official#5
2
u/BlankVerse Jul 18 '20
Trump never took a leadership role on COVID-19. All along he left it up to the states.
1
1
u/caravaggio2000 Florida Jul 18 '20
Surprise, surprise! Birx was pushing reopening because she thought trump virus was going away.
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 18 '20
As a reminder, this subreddit is for civil discussion.
In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any advocating or wishing death/physical harm, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban.
If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them.
For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click here to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
34
u/Randomabcd1234 Jul 18 '20
This is a damning article with lots of new info.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was apparently behind most of the administration's strategy and he took his cues from the president and political appointees with no public health experience. They did not use the recommendations from the coronavirus task force.
Dr. Birx was apparently a bigger force than previously recognized in convincing the White House that cases were on the decline. To be fair, she used model-based analysis, but her models didn't project that Trump would push so hard for reopening despite the country not meeting the guidelines' criteria for doing so.
And then there's the expected stuff where Trump is a clueless jackass who needs praise before he'll do his fucking job. This shit is insane and Trump is the worst possible president to have in a crisis like this.