The Sum of All Fears
/Just when we most need a credible White House, the new five-syllable word on all our lips – coronavirus – now looms as the name of a global public health emergency.
This is the time we need calm and credibility from the top. We need a reassuring word, smart leadership, and clear instructions about what to do, what to know, how to take care of our families.
Instead, what we read and hear from the White House briefing room is more palaver about the enemies that the President sees, the “hoaxes” he perceives, and how they are still out to get him.
It’s always about him, not the rest of us.
From where I sit, all this has pulled into a very sharp focus the limitations of Donald Trump’s ill-equipped, odd-ball administration – the President’s own unpreparedness, his inability to put aside his own personality and personal needs, his struggle to manage anything let alone a global crisis, his beefs with science and scientists.
It is a dark, dispiriting world that Trump is making of our good nation. That gloomy strategy has many dimensions, and most of it is appearing in real time now.
What’s Most Important?
It’s not the stock market. It’s the people.
Trump’s first response has been market-based and campaign-based, not science-based. We are reminded how he doesn’t read, not even the briefing papers he is given to inform him on the nature and scale of the virus.
Who’s in Charge?
His designation of his VP Pence to lead the coronavirus response team was in no way calming. It was objectively odd because Pence also rejects science, and he brings no plausible track record of leading such an initiative.
Question: Why Pence and not, say, Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, one of the world’s leading authorities on infectious diseases.
Answer: Because Pence is a reliable automaton, and because Trump trusts no one who isn’t inescapably under his thumb, ever tuned to Trump’s personal approval and political interests. And because a Bill Schaffner and his colleagues across the U.S. are, at the end of the day, solid scientists.
‘Lies, All Lies’
We are also now seeing the most damaging – and dangerous – single thing that Trump and his goons have intentionally done to our nation: Their relentless undermining of anyone’s trust in news media.
Everybody complains about media, and normally that’s OK. In normal times, even newspaper publishers, editors and reporters are OK with the harmless bellyaches. But nothing about this time is normal. Trump has made it so.
In a complicated society, we all need good arbiters and honest presenters of objective facts, especially in times of emergency – war, epidemics, disasters from floods to wildfires. By Trump’s assaulting of any and all news media, to his own political ends, the rest of us are experiencing how this shameful, selfish strategy puts our own families and communities at risk in the face of a threat like coronavirus.
What we all need now is for our President to grasp three truths…
Most of us outside Washington and your golf resorts mainly don’t care about your politics, or what political enemy you see behind this tree or that shrub. Just do your job, if you can.
We want solid, science-based, public-health information now. Not necessary to inter-lace it with your political worries and name-calling.
This isn’t about your re-election. It’s about us and protecting our families.
And we will thank you, going forward, to kindly drop the word “hoax” from your talking points when referring to a global health emergency that has now touched every continent and killed thousands around the world. And counting.
