Whether you support President Trump, oppose him, or neither, I think you owe it to yourself to read Joseph Nye’s piece at Project Syndicate. Here’s its opening:
CAMBRIDGE – Leadership – the ability to help people frame and achieve their goals – is absolutely crucial during a crisis. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill demonstrated this in 1940, as did Nelson Mandela during South Africa’s transition from apartheid.
By these historical standards, the leaders of the world’s two largest economies have failed abysmally. US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, both initially reacted to the coronavirus outbreak not by informing and educating their publics, but by denying the problem, thereby costing lives. They then both redirected their energies toward assigning blame rather than finding solutions. Owing to their failures, the world may have missed the window for responding to the crisis with a “Sputnik moment†or a “COVID Marshall Plan.â€
Leadership theorists make a distinction between “transformational†and “transactional†leaders. The latter try to steer through situations with business as usual, whereas the former try to reshape the situations in which they find themselves.
Of course, transformational leaders do not always succeed. Former US President George W. Bush tried to remake the Middle East by invading Iraq, with disastrous consequences. By contrast, his father, former President George H.W. Bush, had a more transactional style; but he also had the skills to manage the fluid situation that the world found itself in after the collapse of communism in Europe. The Cold War ended, Germany was reunited and anchored firmly to the West, and not a shot was fired.
I don’t think that there’s any question but that Xi Jinping has been a disastrous leader for the entire world but, importantly, for China. The future, of course, has not been written yet but I suspect he has ended the project that his predecessors began 40 years ago and ended it in failure.
I and practically anyone else who’s even marginally informed can tell you what President Xi should have done differently. What should President Trump have done differently? Be specific. I wish he had begun using the Defense Production Act earlier and were wielding it more now and I wish that he had organized a national program of epidemiological testing so we had some notion of the scope and reach of the disease but I suspect that Dr. Nye’s objection to Trump is less what he has done than who he is. Trump is not a Roosevelt or a Churchill. He cannot rally the people of the United States behind him and encourage them. That just isn’t who he is. Regardless of what he has said or may think he does not have the authority to issue orders to the governors of states or local leaders without declaring martial law which I don’t believe anybody wants. And absent a time machine bringing the supply chains of protective gear and pharmaceuticals within the United States is going to take time. It should be done but it won’t happen instantaneously or painlessly.
I would date the failure of leadership in the U. S. much, much earlier to the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the U. S. and China. Offering China anything of value without requiring liberalization or, indeed, much of anything was an error. That error was aggravated by granting China MFN status and its admission to the World Trade Organization.
That failure wasn’t the failure of a single president. It was bipartisan. It was the failure of an entire class. Trump was elected in large part as a reaction to that failure. If you want less Trump, make fewer persistent errors of that scope, mitigate the risks, and reverse the harm that has already been done.
No problem being specific.
1) His leadership team was weak. He emphasized having former lobbyists and people who were good at sucking up, not quality medical people. Kushner is involved with leadership decisions and he has no expertise or experience related to this at all. Have to think this has affected the CDC, an agency which performed very well during the Ebola crisis, H1N1, and has generally been strong. It has been slow, ineffective and stunningly wrong. As far as I know they didnt have a big turnover in staff. They do have new leaders.
2) Testing. We had the genome in Mid January. When we still had no testing in a couple of weeks he should have fired people or had us take the WHO version, yes made by Germany IIRC. The idea of epidemiological testing was nice, but we didnt have the tests. We still dont have enough. I am still cancelling pt care for lack of testing ability.
3) He wasted much of January and all of February. Should have done whatever was needed to increase PPE productions and supplies. Of course (see #1) he didnt have people in place to help plan that.
4) Half ass^d travel restriction. Good politics and plays well with his base, but countries that have had success restricted all travel or required everyone coming in to be quarantined, not just the unpopular people.
5) Interfering directly with medical care. Who knows how many people died because Suzanne Sommers pushed Laetrile? The last thing we needed was some celebrity pushing a drug in the middle of a crisis. This is not something a responsible person does. For this alone Congress should censure him.
6) Wearing out so one more. Messaging and using the bully pulpit. Trump fans like to say that what he says doesnt matter. BS. Can you imagine Churchill getting on the radio every night to say “it doesnt matter what we do we are going to lose” even if he was doing other stuff correctly? The fact that Trump cannot rally people is a deficiency on his part, but it goes way beyond that. In the early stages Trump was downplaying and minimizing this crisis. If he had just avoided that it would have gone a long way to avoiding many people not taking the virus seriously. Note that everyone else in world did. Did Putin close down Moscow because he read Freguson’s paper or was listening to the left wing press? Modi? The rest of Europe? Greece cares what US left wing press says?
If Trump had the words to inspire people so much the better. As you said he doesnt. Oh well, but he could have at least had the discipline to not undercut stuff all the time.
On a personal note, as a health care provider the constant lies were just awful. Having someone yell at you because their loved one couldn’t get a test after they heard that anyone could get a test was pretty awful. Hearing him say there was plenty of PPE while telling my stuff I wasn’t really sure if were going to be OK and trying to figure what we would do if we didnt get more or if the sterilizer didnt work out. Finally, there are many expert bakers. I really appreciate their efforts getting us through this Covid crisis.
Steve
I basically agree with 2, 3, 6. The rest 🤷â€â™‚ï¸
Only agree on 3 and 6. Testing is just accounting. I don’t think it would have made a bit of difference in policy, in-the-field actions or results. Testing won’t save nursing home habitants, which is ground zero, especially those polluted through inane policy to accept the infected.
I agree Trump didn’t do the Reagan or Churchill posture. Hello. He’s not Reagan or Churchill. But that’s a silly comparison. How many are? Nancy Pelosi? Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Joe Biden? You can’t be serious. Spare me.
But I think you both miss the bigger point – he listened to the “experts.” Bad news, and policy, then cometh. Both Reagan and Churchill were despised for not doing so. He caved under political pressure (Pelosi – “too little too late.” Media – Orange Man Bad, no matter what. He’s effectively a murderer. ) That’s his sin.
He has a few weeks to rectify it. Send these idiots packing. Open up America. Wall Street and Washington are clueless. Main Street is being strangled.
Devils advocate; is the problem not enough followership?
Actually, I think that’s a big part of it. I thought of working that into the post.
Trump has to own the decisions he made, but he clearly went against his own instincts, which were to let the virus sweep through and not close the country. I don’t know how bad that would have been, but I think very bad, considering that in 1918 many events and gatherings were canceled and it was still bad.
So Trump was dragged kicking and screaming to be a humanitarian and put lives ahead of the economy.
The jury is of course, still out.
“But I think you both miss the bigger point – he listened to the “experts.†”
No, he didn’t listen to the experts. If he had then he would have started preparing in that 6 weeks he wasted. He would not have been conveying the message this was a hoax. He didn’t start listening to the experts until we were losing lots of lives and it looked like we could become another Italy. Even then he persisted in listening to quack “experts” and injecting his totally uninformed opinions on medical care.
“How many are? Nancy Pelosi? Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Joe Biden?”
None of those and lets include both Bush I and II, Ford, Nixon, anyone, would have done what he did by undercutting the efforts to control the virus by minimizing and implying it was a hoax while preparing. None of them would have been at the podium essentially shilling snake oil. A disciplined president who gave a shit about people would have asked his medical people to look into the stuff he found interesting.
Also, no other president of which I am aware has placed someone in charge of CDC without prior public health experience. You guys don’t read CDC so you don’t care and are unaware of the influence they have, but the guidance and help coming out of CDC was truly awful for the first couple of months. Unprecedented.
Steve
A postmortem was done on Trump’s pandemic performance, by some here, before the WHO even had identified the Coronavirus as being a pandemic. Furthermore, toxic political environments, such as what we are in today, tend to squeeze out most reason, replaced with opinions saturated by confirmation bias. Consequently, it becomes an act of futility to even refute earlier screeds posted here, ragging relentlessly on the president.
However, what I will comment on is my noted â€toxic political environment.†The intense non-stop pushback, generated by a bipartisan conglomeration of hostile actors towards anything the Trump Administration does or says, has been stunningly overwhelming. It started before the November general election, continued through the 2016 transition phase, only to gain steam immediately following the presidential inauguration, evolving into lengthy Russian collusion conspiracy investigations. Such a partisan-run fiasco lasted throughout the 2018 primaries, and beyond, for more than 2 1/2 years. When the results finally came back with lackluster conclusions, another political event was ginned up, generated by murky anonymous whistleblower accusations, prompting freak show impeachment hearings, bleeding into January/February of this year. This highly televised distraction, led by the left stream media and dem leadership, prevailed over any other news, including the Coronavirus creeping into the US during those early months of 2020.
Once the pivot was made over to COVID, though, the slew of bad press, naysayers, unadulterated criticism became the underpinnings for another crusade, aimed at undercutting every turn made by this president to address this pandemic. Normally there’s a pause in critiquing any leaderships’ actions until after a crisis of this magnitude has ebbed. Nonetheless, while some governors may have had only mild public admonishing for errors made during their preliminary decision making, Trump has been derided, and given no cooperation or grace period from the opposition party or it’s loyal democrat press. Instead, the Dems/media allies have unmercifully crucified him, from the virus’s beginning to the current day, readying themselves for yet another politically motivated oversight sideshow, parlaying executive mismanagement, as they sidestep their own legislative and MSM mistakes and dawdling.
In the meantime, long ago requested documents are finally making their way, involuntarily, out of the hands of intelligence agencies and deceitful dem politicians, demonstrating the depth and breathe of behind-the-scenes corruption, occurring at the get go of this administration’s tenure in office. From doctored documents, innumerable FISA errors, withholding exculpatory evidence, even the creation of an erroneous scope memo – the mind-blowing fraud constructed around these illegitimate presidential investigations is coming to light. What will come of it, who knows. The Dems, of course, are in full denial. Their complicit media friends continue to cover for them. But, those, possessing even a shred of honest perspective, are saying the evidence gradually being exposed makes the Watergate transgressions look like kindergarten stuff.
Just to follow up on the CDC leadership, link goes to pro CDC directors. All of them had prior training in public health and/or significant experience. Fitzgerald, who preceded Redfield, had no formal training but had experience. Same for Satcher. As an example look at James Mason who ran the CDC for Reagan. MD, MPH and ran the Utah department of Health before leading the CDC. In our biggest public health crisis in years the person leading the CDC had no expertise or experience in public health. Please let me note, nay shout it from the rooftops, there are many people with expertise in public health and you dont necessarily have to be a doctor or epidemiologist. However, what we got was a person with no expertise. Is it any wonder that the CDC has performed so poorly.
jan- “A postmortem was done on Trump’s pandemic performance, by some here, before the WHO even had identified the Coronavirus as being a pandemic. ”
You know what a pandemic is right? It is generally thought of as an epidemic that is present in many countries. SO WHO declared it an international emergency at the end of January. There was no need to wait until Covid was well established in many countries and officially called a pandemic before prep was started. We, my practice, certainly didnt wait.
Steve
Oops.
https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/pastdirectors.htm
Steve, the so-called prep does not fall on the federal government’s shoulders alone. The states bear responsibility to keep emergency supplies up to speed, as well. Also, when one administration hands over power to another it should do so with full cupboards of PPE, rather than depleted ones. In fact the only thing the prior administration stockpiled was a load of devious maneuvers, meant to hamper and redirect efforts of
the next administration to fully function without being under constant duress of malicious, uncalled for scrutiny from opponents, both inside and outside of the WH.
Furthermore, due to the push for globalism, by former presidents, many needed supply chains were already off-shored, making the automatic collection of pandemic supplies impossible to immediately fulfill. This was also true of loosening up entrenched CDC, FDA regulations which initially hindered the creation of new “accurate†test kits for a new virus suddenly emerging on the scene. The WHO did not offer to share their testing with the US either.
But, these points have already been brought up and glossed over by you, in your rush to condemn everything this administration has done to address the spread, containment and remedies sought for this virus.
jan- As a practical matter only the federal government has the resources to manage a national level crisis. Local and state governments should have adequate resources to get through the initial stages, which they did for the most part.
It has been three years since Trump took office. By his own words this is the best economy the world has ever seen. (What he said on Fox today or yesterday.) This far in you dont get to blame the prior government. The first year, sure, but not now. Also it turns out that the supposed rules that made things more difficult for the FDA were never passed. However, that should still be a non-issue. Rules meant for normal times need to be superseded by a good leader. You keep, deliberately in have to assume at this point, forgetting who appointed the leaders at CDC and FDA and who had the authority to hold them accountable. Trump chose crappy leaders and he did not hold them accountable.
Example: The CDC held on to the idea that the virus could not be transmitted by asymptomatic people well past the point where it was obvious it could do that. Why? I hope they do a past mortem on this. My guess is that the CDC didnt want to reach this conclusion because they would then need to tell Trump this would be difficult to manage and anyone who tells Trump bad news gets fired.
Supply chains were offshore? They still are. Supply chains are also concentrated in the US like they weren’t in the past. Every month I deal with at least one or two drug shortages because of that. For the last 6-7 months it has primarily been local anesthetics. All made here in the US and not due to supply chain issues. Chronic shortages in medications are a way of life in the US.
As an aside, you don know that rules meant for normal times are almost always a hindrance in emergencies? Maybe you never worked in an emergency situation.
Steve
Simply because something is made in the United States you cannot conclude no supply chain issues. Pharmaceuticals are not waved into existence from the ether; they are made from ingredients and, frequently, the ingredients themselves have lengthy supply chains. My experience is that it is frequently the case that manufacturers are not really aware of just how long their supply chains are when you take the various underlying raw materials and intermediate processes into account.
On occasion I have asked where certain ingredients were obtained to be told they were “U. S.-sourced” but what was meant by that was that they purchased from a middle man located in the United States. They had no idea that what they were using had been made in China.
I disagree with that categorically. Rules meant for normal times need to be updated by a good Congress. The system needs to be resilient rather than dependent on one individual.
Said another way what we are experiencing is not merely a failure of leadership although it is that. It is a system failure.
“I disagree with that categorically.”
I disagree with that categorically. For example a rule might require that development be stopped for 6 months to allow for public comments and feedback. This is actually pretty common for changes in regulations. In an emergency we do away with the 6 month pause. You may ordinarily call for 8 months of testing. You can cut that. You can take a system that is calibrated for 99.999% to 99%. In the ideal, you have foreseen emergencies and planned out what you can cut. In reality you just cant plan for everything.
“Simply because something is made in the United States you cannot conclude no supply chain issues.”
This has been a longstanding problem. For the rest of the world this comes as a big surprise. So believe it or not my profession has a committee set up many years ago to look into this issue. Lack of supplies has occasionally been an issue, but more often there have been issues with problems at the factories. Mold growth, glass particles in the drugs, lack of sterility, failures to adequately inspect, mechanical breakdowns, etc.
jan- I keep meaning to ask you for specifics. You generally respond by saying people are mean to Trump and blaming Obama. So please try to be specific. Why is Trump the only president in modern history to have someone run CDC without experience in public health? Is it just a coincidence that CDC has performed so poorly?
Steve
That is something about which I have been complaining for decades. Just because something notionally meets the same specifications as a domestically-produced product does not mean it’s an equivalent product. Note that the amount it would cost to re-qualify the products after they arrive in the U. S. would wipe out the putative benefit from offshore outsourcing.
For one thing those measures should be controlled by legislation not by executive edict. You’re right that it’s a long-standing problem. Congress has been unconstitutionally delegating its authority for decades. Similarly, suspending those regulations should be an act of the legislature as well. An emergency that persists for a couple of days or weeks is one thing. One that endures for months or even years is something else entirely.
I would add that government agencies—everything from the local level right up to federal departments—don’t work the way you seem to think they do. I have sat in on hundreds of meetings of city, county, state, and federal government agencies and I don’t mean public meetings. The politically-appointed heads just aren’t as important as you seem to think they are. The bureaucracies largely continue on automatic pilot.
Where I fault the administration is on allowing the agencies to continue on automatic pilot. In other words you think the problem is that the CDC didn’t continue its usual practices and I think the problem is that it did.
It’s telling tales out of school but here’s a partial list of the agencies I’ve had as clients over the years:
Chicago Public Schools
Chicago Housing Authority
Cook County Board
Illinois Dept. of Insurance
U. S. Customs Service
Federal Reserve
Government agencies were never more than a small proportion of my business and they always were a time-suck.
“For one thing those measures should be controlled by legislation not by executive edict. ”
Maybe the legislature should have anticipated a pandemic every 100 years, but they didnt and they really cant anticipate everything. That is one of the reasons you need an executive branch. Again, in the ideal they make some broader definitions about when the exec branch can go around those rules, and hope you have some oversight. Of course you then risk abbouse or misuse, so you hope you have a competent exec and you hope that voters are willing to hold the exec branch accountable.
Steve
As a practical matter the role for the federal government in this crisis is to backstop the state governments rather than being relied on as the sole resource. If that possibility is extended to the states, they will seize it and do little themselves.
I think that Trump was remiss in not controlling restricting traffic to/from the NYC metro area early on but can you imagine the outrage?
Short of declaring martial law the federal government cannot control state governments. That is beyond its authority. But controlling what happens on federal roads is within its power as is regulating interstate air traffic.