President Donald Trump’s response to the Coronavirus crisis has been an abject failure. Amidst his delusional self-congratulations for a supposed job well done, tens of thousands of Americans have died and over 1.4 million have been infected with the virus. Now, the editorial board of the esteemed medical journal The Lancet has issued rare political commentary, implicitly insisting that Trump must be removed in the upcoming November elections if there’s to be any hope of a systematic recovery for the public health system in the United States. Trump has routinely opted to rely on nonsense predictions from inexperienced political advisers rather than science-based public health counsel.
Deriding “the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis,” The Lancet wrote:
‘The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimized and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus…. The Trump administration’s further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.’
The CDC in particular has been largely sidelined by the Trump administration amidst the Coronavirus crisis. As The Lancet notes, during the early days of the pandemic, the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier no longer even appeared at press conferences of the White House Coronavirus task force after she issued grave warnings about the looming threats from the Coronavirus. The Trump administration has also removed CDC officials from overseas public health cooperation positions via eliminating those posts entirely and, in the thick of the crisis, pushed CDC guidelines for safe reopening to the side.
Trump, on his own time, has dismissed the significance of the Coronavirus over and over. As The Lancet notes:
‘The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear.’
Most recently, the president has simply dismissed the significance of the virus altogether. He’s been daily obsessing over a made-up scandal that he has named “Obamagate,” but he has failed to really explain what on earth that term actually means.
On Friday morning, he glibly tweeted:
‘Thank you to @foxandfriends for covering, supremely, the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States, OBAMAGATE. Fake News @CNN and Concast’s own MSDNC are only trying to make their 3 year Con Job just go away. They are embarrassed and don’t know what to do’
Thank you to @foxandfriends for covering, supremely, the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States, OBAMAGATE. Fake News @CNN and Concast’s own MSDNC are only trying to make their 3 year Con Job just go away. They are embarrassed and don’t know what to do….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 15, 2020
That sounds like projection from the president. In fact, he’s making all of this up. There is no grand scandal that demands attention while over 1,000 Americans continue to die each and every day due to the Coronaivirus. Trump and his closest political allies seem completely ignorant of the actual gravity of the situation at hand.
