A Quote For Trump's Tombstone: "I Don't Take Responsibility At All"

Die For Me by Nancy Ohanian

Unless you think it was just the racism and/or the anger at the establishment, you have probably asked yourself why over 60 million non-multimillionaires voted for Trump in 2016. Do all 60 million have IQs under 85, rendering them incapable of basic abstract thought and simple mental problem solving? Probably many of them do, but in an analysis for CNN yesterday, John Harwood pointed out that during the campaign Trump persuasively "pitched himself as a successful businessman and an executive, even though his actual record included a string of spectacular bankruptcies and lawsuits-- including an effort during the 2008 financial crisis to sidestep a $40 million debt to Deutsche Bank by invoking a "force majeure" clause likening the economic catastrophe to riots or floods. Rather than pay what he owed, he sued the bank claiming harm to his finances and reputation, eventually settling out of court. That's the executive Americans have seen in the White House during the coronavirus calamity. Instead of accepting responsibility for the administration's laggard, chaotic response, Trump has launched a full-scale attempt to shift blame onto others, including China and the media. Instead of crisp action and clear lines of command, Trump has offered indecision, changing his positions on guidance to the public and routinely undermining his own health experts. It's the opposite of the 'buck stops here' leadership that defines strong corporate executives and presidents alike. Yet while blame-casting may represent Trump's best option as a matter of raw politics, the 'not my fault' line poses a much tougher sell from the Oval Office than in 2016, when Trump was an outsider." Now we are in a recession, possibly headed for a depression and under Trump's malignant leadership nearly a third of the American economy has ground to a standstill.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post looked at the denialism and dysfunction with which the Trumpist regime approached the pandemic. They saw the enemy approach and they brought nothing but bluster and incompetence to the battle. Now hundreds of thousands of Americans are infected and the death toll is approaching 10,000.

Trump was told about the impending catastrophe early in January for U.S. intelligence agencies and even by his own Health Secretary Alex Azar. He dismissed their urgent entreaties as "alarmist" and now says Azar should have gotten his attention more forcefully. Maybe Azar could have set his hair on fire or staged a musical play or kidnapped Trump's grandchildren. Trump's response to the early warnings was to call it a hoax, tell the American people it was no worse than the common flu, that it was "totally under control," and that it would pass in a few weeks.

Tom Porter, writing for Business Insider, reported that "It was a lack or urgency from the White House, the failure to formulate a coherent chain of command and bureaucratic delays that meant that the US was unable to formulate a mass testing program in the early weeks of the outbreak to effectively track and isolate it, according to critics. It was only in March-- more than two months after being briefed by Azar-- that Trump finally realized the scale of the problem facing his administration, and that his legacy would be defined by his response."

In his report over the weekend for NBC News, Jonathan Allen quoted Eric Swalwell (D-CA):

This country is re-learning what it understood during the Cold War-- we don’t elect presidents for the good days, we elect them to handle the bad days. Donald Trump is incapable of handling a bad day, let alone a protracted pandemic.

Allen asserts that "More than two months into what President Donald Trump calls a "war" against COVID-19, his administration's efforts to combat the deadly disease, along with its disastrous effects on the U.S. economy, are often creating more problems than they solve. Bidding wars for life-saving equipment, a power struggle between Trump's son-in-law and the vice president, political gamesmanship, the centralization of authority and decentralization of accountability, and the creation of new government programs while standing bureaucracies are ignored, have all contributed to chaos within the political, economic and health care systems. Banks haven't been able to process loan applications for a new Small Business Administration relief program, companies trying to produce personal protective equipment for medical professionals can't get the Federal Emergency Management Administration's attention, and doctors and ventilators at ambulatory surgery centers idled by a soft moratorium on elective operations are on the sidelines." And it gets worse:

Those problems are minor compared to the crunch of rising coronavirus cases, the scarcity of ventilators and the possibility that trillions of dollars in aid won't be enough-- or well-directed enough-- to prevent a catastrophic economic collapse.

It all adds up to a sense that no one is really in charge in the midst of the most daunting crisis the nation has faced in generations.

...The absence of national leadership comes even at a time when Congress and the Federal Reserve are pumping cash into the system and many businesses who want to provide assistance have found they can't connect with federal agencies.

...[P]oor preparation for the pandemic has been compounded both by policies that have been implemented and by the Trump administration's inability to coordinate the distribution of health care assets-- equipment like ventilators, masks and gloves, and trained medical personnel-- and the effort to backstop an economy suddenly thrust into reverse.

More than three years into his tenure, Trump has blamed his predecessor, Barack Obama, for a barren national stockpile of needed medical equipment and at the same time said that the federal government should not be relied upon as a supplier.

"The states should have been building their stockpiles," he said at a White House press briefing this week. "We’re a backup. We’re not an ordering clerk."

He also invited his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to speak about the response for the first time, acknowledging the prominent behind-the-scenes role Kushner has taken in recent days on a task force that had been the domain of Vice President Mike Pence.

Moron by Chip Proser

"I've been serving really at the direction of the vice president and he's asked me to get involved in different projects," Kushner said in response to a question about reports that he is running a "shadow" task force parallel to Pence's effort.

The biggest issue on the front lines of the coronavirus fight is scarcity. On its own, that's not a problem of Trump's making, but it has been exacerbated by his insistence that states and cities compete with the federal government and private-sector buyers, including deeper-pocketed hospitals, for test kits, ventilators, masks, gowns and other items.

The truth is, there's not much equipment out there to be had. Much of the personal protective gear used in the United States is manufactured in China, where the coronavirus devastated production months ago.

On top of that, rising demand and the waiver of some federal rules for protective gear has inspired the development of a very hot "gray market" for the goods. That market means less quality control, buyers who are often unfamiliar with sellers or brokers as they are inundated with solicitations, prices that have skyrocketed, and orders that are frequently canceled at the last minute, according to several people involved in bidding for the equipment.

That can mean losses in terms of the opportunity cost of bidding teams' time, money thrown away or, even worse, the risk of outfitting emergency medical personnel with substandard equipment.

"The demand curve is far exceeding the supply curve ... which is resulting in unvetted and uncertified suppliers entering the marketplace," said Chaun Powell, vice president for strategic supplier engagement at the health care consulting firm Premier.

...More often than not, reports from around the country and across sectors of the economy show inefficiency from the federal government at best and incompetence at worst. In some cases, the administration's actions may have had unanticipated downsides.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams' admonition to limit elective surgeries was the right call but has hammered ambulatory surgery centers, just as stay-at-home guidelines have had a painful effect on health care providers who are not involved in the coronavirus fight more broadly, according to Jim Rechtin, CEO of Envision.

His company, which operates more than 250 ambulatory surgery centers and employs 27,000 clinicians, including 11,000 who work in emergency rooms, has ventilators on hand and doctors who are able to travel to work with coronavirus patients. He's looking for ways to get ventilators to hospitals-- despite his concern that they won't be replenished-- and clinicians need to be paid.

"It’s a mismatch of supply and demand-- part of that is coordination and part of it's the financial support to make it happen," he said, adding that there are "signs that there is early activity in this area but we could use more, faster."

Two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that FEMA isn't responding to requests from companies looking to supply goods for the coronavirus fight. The emergency management bureau's regional offices are well-schooled in disaster response, but the White House has basically thrown that organizational structure out the window in favor of centralizing power. Trump has also chosen not to use established logistics chains at other agencies, preferring a task-force model that has yet to wrangle the towering management challenge.

Outside the health system, businesses are closing up shop and laying off workers at a record pace. Ten million people have filed new unemployment claims in the last two weeks alone, and even industries that were expected to hum through the coronavirus crisis are witnessing severe slow-downs. Across the country, big trucks are parked for days on end with nothing to haul, according to multiple sources familiar with the industry.

"The food factories are reducing our shipments," said Dan Eberhart, who owns trucking and oil companies. "They’re doing this because the employees showing up at the factories are shrinking" in number.

Eberhart, who is a major fundraiser for GOP candidates, said Trump needs to get on the ball on the Small Business Administration relief program that has been overwhelmed by applications but unable to get off the ground.

"I have several industrial businesses seeking these SBA loans, and the banks won't even take the applications yet and/or haven't been able to submit them to the SBA," he said in a text message late Saturday night. "If President Trump doesn't speed this up, the U.S. is going to have an economy the size of the Cayman Islands." Right now, he appears to be having trouble proving he can manage a government bigger than that.

AP reporter Michael Biesecker, confirming Allen's report, wrote that "As the first alarms sounded in early January that an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China might ignite a global pandemic, the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment. A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers. By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile. Now, three months into the crisis, that stockpile is nearly drained just as the numbers of patients needing critical care is surging. Some state and local officials report receiving broken ventilators and decade-old dry-rotted masks. 'We basically wasted two months,' Kathleen Sebelius, health and human services secretary during the Obama administration, told AP."

Trump is now suggesting masks are optional but that if people can't find any they can cover their faces with bandanas and scarves. His congressional enablers, though, are still marching in lockstep behind him as he leads the country precariously towards the cliff. Mike Siegel is running for a Texas congressional seat held by a Trump stooge, Michael McCaul. McCaul is the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and had access to the earliest January-- and likely earlier-- warnings about the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan. 

Yesterday Siegel noted that "Instead of taking action to save American lives, McCaul followed Trump’s playbook of ignore, deny, deflect. Now, after squandering critical months to activate U.S. manufacturing to provide the country with PPE, and ventilators, open shuttered hospitals, slow the spread and prepare for the surge-- McCaul’s only response is to blame China and promote xenophobia and a new 'red scare.' His inaction amounts to complicity in an ongoing crime against humanity that will result in a tremendous and substantially preventable loss of life."

Kara Eastman is in a similar situation-- in a winnable race against in Omaha for a swing district seat held by Trump enabler Donald J. Bacon. Kara told us that "Bacon has demonstrated his allegiance to this failed federal response by staging phony photo-ops in the community, putting vital nonprofit and health care workers, not to mention homeless men, women and children, at risk."

Similarly, Julie Oliver-- like Mike Siegel and Kara Eastman, is in a rematch of a 2018 race she nearly won-- is running against a knee-jerk Trump puppet, Roger Williams, who was regurgitating the Trump talking points on the pandemic through the first week of March. As recently as March 7, Williams said, "the risk still remains low for spread in our communities." Shortly before then, at the CPAC conference on February 27, Williams mistrustful comments on the ability of government to help citizens were on full display: "Big government picks winners and losers. It pushes down, you know, opportunity to create new thoughts and to create more jobs and that sort of thing. And Government needs to release regulations and let competition work. You know the best thing for small business or any business is let the customer tell you if you're doing a good job, not have the government trying to tell you what to do-- and consumers do that. So if you give good service and you have a good price and you have a good product, people will buy from you. And I'd like to see us get to where government does three things: collect my taxes, defend my borders, have good infrastructure and get the heck out of everybody's life. That should be our goal."

Julie, Mike and Kara all have distinctly different points of view about the role of government. That's why they are firm supporters of government programs like Social Security and Medicare-- and want to expand and strengthen both, while conservatives like McCaul, Bacon and Williams would like nothing better than to abolish both. Please consider helping the campaigns Julie, Mike and Kara have had to redesign because of the pandemic. Grassroots campaign techniques will have to give way to expensive mass media advertising that none of them have counted on. I implore you to click on the 2020 Blue America congressional thermometer on the right and contribute what you can to the candidates who will protect programs that conservatives hope to destroy under cover of the pandemic and the economic hard times their own disastrous response had thrust on the rest of us.