Guess Who’s on Trump’s Task Force to Reopen America?
Donald Trump’s presidency has been terrifying from its infancy, but it’s all the more so now that he’s created a task force to reopen America in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and packed it not with leading public-health officials or economic experts but a who’s who of clubby cabinet appointees.
According to a Fox News report, the motley crew includes Mark Meadows, Trump’s fourth chief of staff and a climate-science denier; Treasury Secretary and former hedge-fund manager Steven Mnuchin; Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose failure to divest his multimillions “keeps ethics watchdogs up at night,” as NPR put it; Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who also happens to be the wife of Trump’s senatorial puppet Mitch McConnell; and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who generally does not make sense. (Trump refuted a report that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner would be members of the task force, so at least there’s that.)
In an unprecedented situation that demands some of the smartest and most highly specialized minds in the world, Trump just so happened to find them all in his own administration. How convenient—the search must have been exhaustive and taken all of five minutes. Now, never fear, they’re here to save America from a historic economic nosedive, including 17 million unemployed and counting, in the middle of a deadly pandemic. What could possibly go wrong?
Related Video: Comparing the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 to the Coronavirus
The president’s latest collective is notable for who they are but also for who they are not. Not one of them, with the exception of retired neurosurgeon Carson, is a doctor or public-health expert, and that’s who should definitely have a say on when it is safe to begin to reopen the economy in the wake of a pandemic that has killed close to 24,000 people nationwide. But the underrepresentation of medical or health expertise on the task force, the notion that it can plow ahead to economic revival with little regard for science or potential threat to the public, is pure Trump—par for the course from a man who, ignoring all the facts before him, vowed just a few weeks ago that churches would be packed and the nation would be open and “raring to go” by Easter. In another classic Trump move, Carson is believed to be only African American who will be selected for the group, even as data shows the coronavirus is hitting communities of color the hardest.
When the world is crumbling, Trump clearly believes that his inner circle—mostly moneyed white men—is supremely qualified to solve things. Never mind that the first task force to tackle the new coronavirus, led by Vice President Mike Pence, perhaps his chief yes-man, has been woefully, dangerously inadequate. Besides being messy and slow to act, a new NPR investigation showed this week that the administration has largely failed to deliver on the major promises Trump made when he declared a state of emergency in the Rose Garden more than a month ago—no wide-scale drive-thru testing nor a website to help people determine if they need a test. It was often remarked that Trump would run the country like a businessman. But in the time of a global pandemic, it’s just one facet of Trump’s downfall: He continues to operate as if the private sector, including ex-Goldman executives like Mnuchin or steel magnates like Ross, has what it takes to single-handedly save public health.
Notably, Trump failed to tap any governors for the task force either, even as they have been the ones who, in the lack of federal leadership, have stepped up to manage the crisis. As the president blindly asserts his “total authority” to reopen the government—disregarding the 10th Amendment, which reserves states’ rights—coalitions of states on both the East Coast and West Coas have formed to manage the process of getting on a path to a new normal. It’s a telling rebuke, one that sees Trump’s task force for what it is: a new name for a collection of old cronies.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
