National Review Online
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Every American should want President Trump and his
administration to handle the coronavirus epidemic effectively and successfully.
Those who seem eager to see the president fail and to call every administration
misstep a fiasco risk letting their partisanship blind them to the demands not only
of civic responsibility but of basic decency.
The virus looks likely to be the most serious acute
public-health crisis Americans have had to face at home in decades. It is still
spreading at exponential rates. Fatality rates are much higher than the flu and
other familiar bugs, particularly for older people. There is no vaccine for the
time being. The character of its spread and symptoms threatens to gradually
overwhelm the capacity of health systems in affected areas, leaving them short
of hospital beds and respirators to treat the most seriously afflicted patients
and so dramatically increasing the risks to them. The most effective ways to
mitigate this danger involve forms of social distancing that require everyone
(not just those at greatest risk) to engage in measures like canceling events,
limiting travel, and avoiding public places — measures that cannot help but
seem extreme in our free society. That these expedients are necessary and
appropriate is increasingly clear and yet difficult to explain to the public.
All of this means that the administration faces an
enormous challenge, that its successes are likely to be largely invisible, and
that its failures cannot help but be magnified. Therefore, we should go out of
our way to acknowledge some of the capable people throughout the chain of
command doing their best in very difficult circumstances. They have failed in
some respects and have succeeded in others. They will do more of both, but
there is reason to think they will learn from their errors and step up to the
challenge.
At the same time, however, it is important that the
president’s defenders not be blinded by partisanship of their own into excusing
failures of leadership and diminishing the danger of the epidemic itself. This
can be particularly difficult because some of the most significant inadequacies
of the administration have been the president’s own. So far in this crisis,
Donald Trump himself has obviously failed to rise to the challenge of
leadership, and it does no one any favors to pretend otherwise.
The disastrous missteps involved in the effort to make
testing kits available nationwide are not the president’s own. They are the
fault of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they represent a
serious scientific, technical, and bureaucratic failure for which the
appropriate officials should be held responsible. But those problems are
clearly being corrected now, and there is every reason to think testing kits
will soon be available to all who need them.
The failures of leadership at the top, however, show no
sign of being corrected. In a serious public-health crisis, the public has the
right to expect the government’s chief executive to lead in a number of crucial
ways: by prioritizing the problem properly, by deferring to subject-matter experts
when appropriate while making key decisions in informed and sensible ways, by
providing honest and careful information to the country, by calming fears and
setting expectations, and by addressing mistakes and setbacks.
Trump so far hasn’t passed muster on any of these
metrics. He resisted making the response to the epidemic a priority for as long
as he could — refusing briefings, downplaying the problem, and wasting precious
time. He has failed to properly empower his subordinates and refused to trust
the information they provided him — often offering up unsubstantiated claims
and figures from cable television instead. He has spoken about the crisis in
crude political and personal terms. He has stood in the way of public
understanding of the plausible course of the epidemic, trafficking instead in
dismissive clichés. He has denied his administration’s missteps, making it more
difficult to address them.
This presidential behavior is all too familiar. It is how
he has gotten through scandals and fiascos for more than three years in office.
But those were all essentially political in nature, and most were self-created.
The country has been lucky in the Trump era, largely avoiding the sorts of
major, unforeseen crises that make the greatest demands of the modern
presidency. That luck has now run out, and this demands a new level of
seriousness from the president and those around him.
President Trump needs to rise to this challenge. His
partisan adversaries are sure he can’t. We hope he proves them wrong.
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