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.