Donald Trump Commits Three Unforced Coronavirus Errors
(Bloomberg Opinion) --
As the coronavirus spreads, it’s increasingly clear that the U.S. government has made mistakes. This is a difficult time to assess those mistakes, however; it’s not yet clear, and won’t be for some time, either the extent or the responsibility for things that have gone wrong. We’re going to see more articles about how things went awry, and that’s part of how democratic accountability works — moreover it’s an important part of how, in a democracy, governments are able to adjust course and get closer to successful policy.
So keep in mind when reading or viewing such stories that they’re necessary, healthy and also probably at least a little sensationalized. They typically also fail to take into account that no response will ever be perfect.
What’s easier to assess are the public actions and statements of the president, and wow, is Donald Trump bad at this. Let’s take three recent examples.
One was Trump’s false claim on Wednesday that an Obama administration policy had made testing more difficult, a claim that was apparently just made up. So many things are wrong here. First of all, it’s important that people can believe the president during this kind of situation; obviously saying false things undermines that. Also, presidents are usually better off acting as if they are in command, as opposed to throwing blame elsewhere. And then there’s Trump’s choice to inject partisanship into the discussion. It’s very simple: A president’s big advantage in difficult times is that he can claim to speak for the entire nation. Using partisan rhetoric squanders that asset.
The second episode? Trump went on Fox News on Wednesday night and gave multiple rambling answers to questions about the outbreak, at one point mentioning people who might go to work while mildly sick. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox points out, Trump was wrongly said to have advised people that they should go to work sick. He did not. He also didn’t give the important message that people should stay home if they’re sick, and he botched other parts of his answer, too.
This is typical Trump: He’s “Donald from Queens,” the guy calling into a radio show to share whatever is on his mind or whatever opinion he’s come up with. Trump simply refuses to accept, and probably doesn’t understand, that he forfeited his right to mouth off on whatever he wants when he was hired by over 300 million bosses to take the job of president. And then on Thursday instead of correcting his inelegant answer, he instead lashed out at the media.
And the third one: Trump is still bragging about how successful he’s supposedly been at stopping the spread of the virus, even as the numbers grow and it’s increasingly clear that what’s happened is a lack of testing, not a lack of infections. Thursday morning he boasted there were “only 129 cases (40 Americans brought in).” By Thursday night, there were more than 200 reported cases. At least George W. Bush stopped at one Mission Accomplished rally.
This isn’t harmless. While again I’d caution against blaming the president for everything that goes wrong, and judging the government by a standard of 100% effectiveness, it’s still true that when a president downplays an issue it takes the pressure off officials to act as if it’s an emergency. And it’s not just federal officials: State and local governments, private parts of the health care system and ordinary citizens also take their cues from the president. If he says, in effect, that there’s nothing to worry about, and that they shouldn’t trust what they hear through the news media, then unfortunately a lot of people are going to believe him — and make bad, and perhaps horribly dangerous, choices.
1. Trevor Cloen and Irfan Nooruddin at the Monkey Cage on trade talks between the U.S. and India.
2. Dan Drezner on Joe Biden’s foreign policy.
3. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson on the end of Warren’s campaign.
4. David A. Fahrenthold, Joshua Partlow, Jonathan O'Connell and Carol D. Leonnig are tracking how Trump is putting taxpaper money in his own pocket.
5. And Tony Lima on the economic policy reaction to the pandemic.
To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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