Trump Still Won’t Lead
This piece was first published in the Kentucky Standard on July 15th, 2020.
For the first time since the pandemic hit the United States, President Donald Trump wore a mask in public. But just like his walk across Layfayette Park to St. John’s, it was part of a PR stunt attempting to gaslight America.
Trump was visiting wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Medical Facility just outside of Washington, DC. Ironically, this visit took place several days after reports surfaced he ignored intelligence Russia had offered insurgents rewards for killing US troops in Afghanistan.
Even with the CDC’s early misstep, which they corrected fairly quickly, Trump could have heeded the advice of other experts and worn a mask to set the tone for the rest of the country at the outset.
How many lives would have been saved had the President been a leading example? Instead, from the beginning, he chose his default defiant tone, telling America that wearing one would make him look weak. His own VP told a panel in Iowa that for optics reasons they would have to remove theirs while he was speaking. He now wears a mask too.
But, it’s still unclear why the President waited months to wear one, while we have known since the earliest days that wearing masks helps prevent the spread of Covid19.
It would have been a simple, clear message to the rest of the population that this choice, no matter how uncomfortable or weird it looked, is a necessary response to the outbreak.
Curiously enough, though, even as Trump played the hoax card with the pandemic, visitors to the White House have been subjected to regular testing. Which one is it, a hoax or something serious enough to require daily testing of visitors to the Oval Office?
Certainly, we should be worried, as I’ve said in previous columns. The President should be calling for increased testing, though to date he thinks more testing would lead to more positives which would lead to negative political outcomes for him. Unfortunately, that means we can conclude the president would rather play politics than solve the crisis. Ironically, if he had been a bit more responsive he might be leading in the polls.
The President clearly would rather hide the spread of the disease than actually confront it. Case in point his impotent rally in the newly recognized Native American territory. Amid a significant outbreak in the area, Trump decided to hold the rally anyway. Which has unsurprisingly, exacerbated the issue in and around Tulsa.
Responsibility for government inaction and missteps will always stop at the President’s desk. Again, something I’ve made clear in previous columns.
In a situation such as this, a pandemic, with many unknowns, that is highly debilitating and deadly, what the public needs is a government willing to take the lead to give clear, concise instructions on how to make decisions. To be clear, some political leaders have. Case in point, Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear. When the cases were exploding around the country and beginning to spread in the Commonwealth, he took to the podium each night to issue updates and directives on how Kentuckians can mitigate the spread of Covid19. Some of us may not have liked what he had to say, but we can’t argue that he was unclear or vague.
On the other hand, the President refused to acknowledge the seriousness of the outbreak for weeks. It’s not necessary to repeat what he said, because we’ve all heard the litany of excuses as to why a robust response wasn’t necessary. Having our most important political leader issue vague and misinformed directives on how to respond to the outbreak created confusion and has ultimately lead to misperceptions about what we should and shouldn’t be doing. I’m not going to pretend to know why Trump did it, but as is his custom he refused to accept the advice of experts thus injecting even more chaos into an already chaotic situation.
As Tess Wilkenson-Ryan writes in her piece for the Atlantic earlier this month, humans are incapable of making sound decisions in the face of a destabilizing crisis. We have a hard time processing the myriad of choices and factors that are in many cases new and often uncomfortable — say, wearing masks or not visiting family. Naturally, we find ways to justify or discount our own actions, while judging others for making the same mistakes as we do. We spend a great deal of time focusing on a singular death, while not being able to grasp the significance when the death toll jumps by thousands. (Maybe this is why conservatives are still rankled by the tragic loss of life in Benghazi, but seem to dismiss that Covid’s death toll is over 30,000 times that.)
It’s all made much more difficult when political leadership, most notably the President of the United States, refuses to issue anything remotely close to cogent. Instead of creating the potential for better options, Americans are resigned to facing the choice of having to work and risk exposure to the virus or stay at home risking eviction/foreclosure and going without food and/or other basic necessities. Why is this the choice Americans are faced with?
Part of me would like to think we shoulder some of the blame, because, as we make our choices at election time (and that includes choosing not to vote as that’s ultimately deciding you’re fine with any possible outcome), leadership is often reflective of society as a whole. But at this moment, that may be too harsh of a conclusion to reach.
The bottom line is what we’re facing is unprecedented. It’s not going away anytime soon. And we need leaders who won’t put their own political outcomes before the needs of the people they serve. We need leaders who will step up, make those choices a little less difficult, and give us clear and cogent messaging for what we’re facing.
At the moment, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania is failing miserably. We deserve better.