The U.S. coronavirus crisis was foreseeable

The U.S. coronavirus crisis was completely predictable.

First, a public health crisis in the form of a pandemic was inevitable. Really. This kind of crisis recurs in human history. Students of history and science knew it would happen again someday.

Second, the crisis that is this administration's inexcusably awful response to the pandemic was also completely predictable. Denial that a crisis exists, followed by boneheaded, simplistic, and futile attempts to address the crisis once its existence can no longer be denied, are exactly how Trump responds to every crisis.

Trump has contempt for expertise whenever it disagrees with his fixed ideas, and he cannnot be brought to revisit those ideas save by trickery.

Trump has the overweening arrogance that is the telltale sign of an inability to cope with being wrong, hence his all-consuming need to blame everyone else for legitimate criticism aimed at him. He is simply terrified of ever admitting responsibility, especially to himself.

Trump also gets a high from crowds cheering his scapegoating. They boost his fragile self-esteem by reinforcing his deep-seated belief that what is popular is also correct.

Trump's self-esteem is also tied to his financial self-worth, so he obsesses over maximizing his personal fortune. That the nation of which he is nominally president might have interests that conflict with his greed does not concern him. He is also incapable of measuring the nation's well-being except in purely economic terms.

Contempt for expertise, the desperate need to protect his fragile ego, and greed explain every deceitful statement Trump and his lackeys have made minimizing the virus' potential and actual impact, every fatuous boast about his administration's response to the crisis, every failure of his administration to act swiftly and in accordance with best scientific practices, and every opportunity his administration missed to mitigate the virus' spread.

Do you know why the U.S. has lower numbers of confirmed coronavirus carriers and COVID-19 sufferers than most other countries? It's not because we're magically immune, and it certainly isn't because of any mitigating action the Trump administration has taken. It's because you can only know the extent of an outbreak if you test widely, and the U.S. is alone among developed nations in its failure to test aggressively. We literally do not know the extent of coronavirus' spread in this country! Still! After months of knowing about its spread in other countries!

We still don't have that basic information because the Trump administration has failed for weeks to marshal the will and the resources. And the failure of will comes squarely from the man on top.

We are still in the dark because Trump's head is in the sand.

Unfortunately, pandemics are like once-a-century floods or storms or earthquakes: even though we know they will happen, as a society we don't prepare for them to anything like the degree we should. President Obama created a pandemic-response team only in the aftermath of the SARS and Ebola crises, a belated recognition that such outbreaks were bound to recur. Unfortunately, of course, Trump dismantled that bit of critical infrastructure. (Honestly, I would have expected nothing less from a man who is so obsessed with hating President Obama.)

So in addition to our usual level of unpreparedness for very infrequent disasters, we face this one saddled with a president whose unique intellectual, emotional, and moral deficits render him incompetent to face it head-on.

And this incompetence was foreseeable.

Trump fails first stage of COVID-19 response

In case it wasn't obvious, the United States is way, way, way the hell behind the curve in reacting to the new coronavirus, the one that causes the infection officially named COVID-19.

Other countries — South Korea, Germany, Italy, China — have been aggressively testing their populations for days or weeks now. They've all managed to test thousands if not tens of thousands of people; in China that number almost certainly has reached into the millions.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., we've seen baffling incompetence from the federal government, and not just from the Incompetent-in-Chief: the respected Centers for Disease Control has fallen down on the job as well, according to a New York Times piece entitled, "As Coronavirus Numbers Rise, C.D.C. Testing Comes Under Fire".

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its first attempt to mass produce a diagnostic test kit, a discovery made only after officials had shipped hundreds of kits to state laboratories.

A promised replacement took several weeks, and still did not permit state and local laboratories to make final diagnoses. And the C.D.C. essentially ensured that Americans would be tested in very few numbers by imposing stringent and narrow criteria, critics say.

One misstep, though exasperating, would have been understandable. This cascade of botched actions, though, tells us that our domestic Dear Leader's assault on the expertise within the federal government has gone far enough that we must assume the federal government is not up to protecting us from COVID-19.

Far more widespread testing in this country should have started days or weeks ago. It didn't happen. Why?

Not just because the C.D.C. botched the first batch of mass-produced tests. Trump also (a) didn't make COVID-19 a priority and (b) had already hollowed out the federal government's pandemic-response capabiility by defunding efforts initiated under President Obama.

Yes, this administration's shameful ineptitude at responding to COVID-19 stems, as so much of its ineptitude does, from the domestic Dear Leader's frustration that a black man did the domestic Dear Leader's job an order of magnitude better than the domestic Dear Leader can.

Trump will lie about his administration's inexcusable failures in responding to COVID-19. However, only those in the thrall of slavishly adoring far-right punditry will believe him.

The truth is that his administration is desperately playing catch-up, flailing to respond due to wounds he inflicted on federal agencies — and due to his own ignorance, overweening pride, and contemptuous indifference to the job he holds.