Heather Digby Parton,
March 19, 2020:
Each day, there is another coronavirus briefing starring Donald Trump. Each day, his team claims progress. Trump claims credit. Nothing much happens. Each day, there is more smoke blown up the national ass. Each day, more people fall sick and die with many, many more on the way.
New York Times,
March 17, 2020:
Even after Mr. Trump committed to supporting the states on Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers said it still had not received direction from the administration. ...
The Department of Veterans Affairs, legally designated as the backup health care system in national emergencies, awaits requests for help. The veterans department has a surplus of beds in many of its 172 hospital centers and a robust number of special rooms for patients with breathing disorders.
The sprawling system of emergency doctors and nurses ready to be deployed by the Department of Health and Human Services — known as the National Disaster Medical System — is also still waiting for orders ...
Kate Brown, Governor of Oregon,
March 13, 2020:
We've been contacting this administration every single day since [March 3], and we have received nothing. Zip. Zero. Nothing from them.
Greg Sargent, Washington Post,
March 18, 2020:
When Trump declared that "I don't take responsibility at all," he meant it seriously, in that this was more than a mere passing effort to dodge one reporter's tough question. Rather, it was a clear statement of purpose and intent: Trump will not take responsibility for whatever we learn about his government's failures, no matter how bad they are established to be.
Trump also meant this literally, in that he literally does not believe it's his responsibility to effectively manage this response, and literally does not believe he is responsible for the consequences that will now unfold, which may end up proving unbearably awful. ...
This effort to erase the early history of the response is concerted and deliberate. It has been wholeheartedly embraced by some of his leading media propagandists. This rewriting effort will continue, and it will grow worse. ...
[T]he new report from the Times is nothing short of infuriating. Among its key revelations:
Numerous states made frantic early requests for equipment and help that went largely unheard and unmet. It was only last week, after an internal report shook up officials with its harrowing predictions of 18 months of hardships ahead, that the federal government pivoted to treating these state requests much more seriously.
Numerous federal agencies — such as the Army Corps of Engineers and other parts of the Defense Department — have not been pressed into service in a serious way, more than eight weeks in. As the Times puts it: "Much of that capacity is untapped." ...
Several states put in requests for masks, and received far less than requested — and many were beyond their expiration date. ...
It is becoming obvious that Trump genuinely does not "take any responsibility" for any of this. ...
He now claims he took it seriously all along, even though a timeline of his own quotes and actions shows that this is steaming nonsense. ...
In short: We are heading into an exceptionally grim set of circumstances, yet the president recognizes zero institutional responsibility to publicly acknowledge his own failures in a way that might enable himself or all of us to learn from them — and thus benefit the country in the immediate term and in the long run.
"He's likely to be responsible for many deaths," Max Skidmore, a political science professor and the author of a book on presidential responses to pandemics, told me.
"We are weeks behind where we should have been if a competent administration had been handling the reaction," Skidmore continued. "The misinformation that he spread caused people to be cavalier." ...
"We have seen presidents who refused to learn from the past," Skidmore said. "But one great danger of the Trump presidency is that he's uninterested in performance as long as he can create the image that he's been successful. Actual success is irrelevant to him. The image of success is what's important."
Skidmore added that even presidents whose failures he has criticized — George W. Bush's on Hurricane Katrina; Dwight Eisenhower's on vaccinations; Woodrow Wilson's on the Spanish flu — didn't sink to quite this level of unconcern about actual results.
"Even if they twisted the truth, they hoped to have a good outcome," Skidmore said. By contrast, Trump appears to be wholly "unconcerned about his performance, so long as he can look good."
Paul Waldman, Washington Post,
March 17, 2020:
At a news conference Tuesday, President Trump took pains to tell the public not only that the coronavirus crisis is serious ... but that he never downplayed it in the first place. ...
Before long, you'll hear Trump supporters say that Trump never denied how serious a public health challenge the virus posed, despite the fact that until this week he had been doing nothing but denying this.
That position has become untenable, so it's necessary to forget that anyone ever held it. ...
We've heard this line from Trump on a variety of subjects: Because I didn't understand something, that means no one did. The point of this revisionist history is to retroactively wipe away Trump's own negligence, to make his repeated efforts to play down the virus fade into the mist. In the new version of history, we didn't go through a period where people were begging Trump to take it seriously; instead, we all realized what was happening at exactly the same moment.
And at that moment, it was only Trump's nearly god-like decisiveness and wisdom that saved us. As Sean Hannity said on Monday: "The president's China and European travel ban, I predict will go down as the single most consequential decision in history. ..."
You might think this would cause cognitive dissonance among conservatives, to have been told for weeks that the coronavirus was no big deal but then suddenly be told that it is in fact a big deal. ...
In the world created by Fox News and conservative talk radio, policy issues and ways of understanding controversies are fluid and subject to change. ... It doesn't matter whether they stand up to scrutiny; what matters is that you have something, anything, that you can repeat when your position is challenged.
What is unchanging are the meta-themes that run through all their coverage: The world is frightening and dangerous. Things were better in the past. White people are besieged and put-upon, while ungrateful minorities have all the advantages. The non-conservative media always lie and so can never be trusted; only what we here at Fox News and other conservative outlets tell you is true.
Beside all those meta-themes, which have been in operation for a few decades now, is one of more recent vintage: Trump is always right. He was right yesterday, and he's right today, even if yesterday he said the opposite of what he's saying today.
So no matter how terrible the situation becomes, Trump and all who support him will insist that two things are true: It would have been far worse had it not been for Trump's masterful leadership, and anything bad that is happening is the fault of Democrats and the media. ...
Soon, we'll be told they were keeping Trump from doing enough to fight it. Indeed, a headline on "Hannity's" website already reads: "As Democrats Pursued Impeachment, Coronavirus Quietly Spread."
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