The Trump Presidency Is Over
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.
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What I explained then, and what I have
said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually,
morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the
paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point
it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and
at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and
leadership ability, will really matter.
“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint
himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years
ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of
knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I
added this:
Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of
ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would
do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national
catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a
chill down the spine of every American.
It took until the second half of
Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus
pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a
crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.
That said, the president and his
administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the
epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few
people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have
left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they
created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus
silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we
were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have
significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered
away that opportunity.
Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the
widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity have been only enhanced
during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States
is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing.
Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody
getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re
not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."
But that’s not all. The president
reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who
in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration
dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose
was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We
worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be
nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and
medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the
number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries
such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths,
but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access
to hospital care.)
Some of these mistakes are less serious
and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in
government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on
incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong.
Yet in some respects, the avalanche of
false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been
one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after
day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic
and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he
can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to
the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.
The president’s misinformation and
mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in
America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down”
when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He
claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t.
He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not
be available for a year or more.
“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have
the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll
take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is
obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will
be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s
objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)
To make matters worse, the president
delivered an Oval Office address that was meant
to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s
delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech,
misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to
correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his
speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together
as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor
Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the
morning after it. As The Washington
Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that
could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”
Taken together, this is a massive
failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is
such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being
honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and
undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is
such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to
unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so
narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from
his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped
to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what
Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.
Donald Trump is shrinking before our
eyes.
The coronavirus is quite likely to be
the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the
bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became
undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a
mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it
should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The
president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more
embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His
administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump
presidency is over.
