The Washington Post has an excellent account of the Trump regime's bungling and failure to respond in a timely manner to the coronavirus outbreak. The entire piece is worth a read, but here's a sample:
Public health experts and officials faced a deluge of challenges, almost from the beginning. First there were the problems with the initial coronavirus test kits, which contained an unspecified problem with a compound that prompted inconclusive results; it took experts nearly three weeks of troubleshooting to find a workaround. Initial U.S. guidelines for testing also were overly narrow, only screening individuals who presented with respiratory symptoms and had either recently traveled to China or come in close contact with an infected person.
Infighting quickly materialized among agencies that have long had poor relationships — feuding was especially intense between the CDC and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response — and when the situation went awry, recriminations were swift. Public health officials and experts also struggled to find an uneasy equilibrium between doing their jobs honestly and transparently while trying to manage a mercurial president, who griped about what he viewed as overheated rhetoric by officials and the media.
At the White House, Trump and many of his aides were initially skeptical of just how serious the coronavirus threat was, while the president often seemed uninterested as long as the virus was abroad. At first, when he began to engage, he downplayed the threat — “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” he tweeted in late February — and became a font of misinformation and confusion, further muddling his administration’s response.
It was inevitable that a crisis would arise that Trump couldn't bullshit his way out of (but that he certainly would try to deflect the blame for, no matter how inane that deflection would be). As we noted in several posts yesterday, Trump's seminal incompetence is compounded by the fawning enablers around him who, knowing they can't get a fact into his thick, empty skull, are simply standing by as he lies about the contagion in the hopes the stock market stops dropping along with his re- election chances. This is the story the media needs to keep telling, because it's the most vivid and close- to- home example of how electing a narcissistic moron might not have been such a great idea -- and re- electing him in the face of his incompetence and malfeasance would be suicidal.On Friday, visiting the CDC in Atlanta, the president spewed more falsehoods when he claimed, incorrectly: “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. They’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.”
BONUS: Have a coronavirus question? Ask Dr. Trump, PhD'oh!
BONUS II: The right- wing Washington Examiner has a brutal takedown of Trump's handling of the coronavirus crisis, calling him "deeply unsuited" to deal with a crisis and not able to bluff his way through it with "his typical antics." (Raw Story link)
