Trump's Sabotage Of Coronavirus Response Capability

(Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

There are multiple analyses concerning the global state of readiness to combat the spread of the coronavirus, which the Centers for Disease Control now says will inevitably spread in the United States.  Thanks (!) to the appalling incompetence of Very Stable Genius Donald "Rump" Trump, we are in a far weaker position to contain the virus than we were at the beginning of his regime.

Laurie Garrett, writing in Foreign Policy in January (note there's a paywall), has one of the better explainers as to how Trump and his sociopathic minions sabotaged our response infrastructure.  Here are some key passages:

For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is. [snip]

In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.

In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced. [snip]

The next epidemic is now here; we’ll soon know the costs imposed by the Trump administration’s early negligence and present panic.

As we note below, the unqualified loyalists Trump has placed in key positions is compounding the problem.  Where we need professional, science- based management, we're getting MAGAts who go to Google for answers to their coronavirus questions.  Where we need intelligent, sober leadership, we're getting a narcissist dimbulb who gauges everything based on the stock market (which is tanking, in part, because we've got a narcissist dimbulb who gauges everything based on the stock market).   As Garrett notes, in the coming weeks and months, we'll feel the effects of having this deluded dunce trying to manage an epidemic after he did his best to weaken our defenses.