It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.
When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent? What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.
“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I added this:
Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.
It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.
To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look. That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity. “They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”
Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity has been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not.”
We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)
But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)
Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong. Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.
The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping.
- He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading.
- He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not.
- He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t.
- He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t.
- He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.
- Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing.
- He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.)
- The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made,
- Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.
“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)
On and on it goes.
To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”
Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious. he nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.
Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.
Capitalism in America: Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge in Conversation with Gillian Tett
it’s useful to understand how the systemworks and the key turning point is avery remarkable period it’s WilliamJennings Bryan William Jennings Bryan in1896 was a fairly young 36 year oldNebraskan who got up in the middle ofthat particular I guess you could sayAssociation of then the Democratic Partyand it was the one of thoseextraordinary events which turnspolitics around the Democratic Party wasa highly conservative party prior tothem and essentially it’s characterizedby presidents who thought that the leastgovernment the best it was essentiallylazy fair he got up Bryan got up andmade this extraordinary speech which isnow historical and then cross of goldspeech about the American worker and theAmerican farmer of being crucified on across of gold called being the goldstandard and that propelled himstrangely enough into the head of theparty he got nominated he never becamepresident because he kept losingyou think he went three times and failedeach time but left a very majorindelible stamp which led to WoodrowWilson and all the way through toFranklin Roosevelt and I you know Ilooked at Bryan as the root of FranklinRoosevelt’s New Dealthat’s fascinating cause I think mostpeople that part of it’s often beingobscured in history it’s again one ofthe reasons why this book is sointeresting is it throws up thesecreating the existing tax pattern [M]yview is that that’s the right thing todo provided you funded the result ofthat is a bit of variance is going to bea very large federal budget deficit andfederal budget deficits invariably downthe road out qualification in genderinflation at the moment we have thetightest labor market I have ever seenthat is the number of job openings issignificantly greater than the number ofpeople looking for work and that mustinevitably begin to push on wages italways has and always will but it’salways delayedand my told you that is something hasgot to give and that’s I don’t knowwhere it all comes out well your blyatcomes out with inflation well theproblem basically is if we do nothingwe’re going to end up with probablystagflation which is an inflation rate Ishould say it’s partly stagnation whichas mentioned was very significantlyslowed output per our output per hournow which used to be 3/4 percent peryearback in the early post-world war iiperiod it’s now well under 1% whichbrings me very nicely on to the nextquestion from the audience which issomeone has asked for you to share yourthoughts about president Trump’s recentcriticism of Jay Powell and the Fed Ilike him to answer that with all theanswers I think it’s very short-sightedthe issue of the Federal Reserve isrequired by the Congress to maintain astable currency which means no inflationno deflation and the policy they’reembarked upon at the moment seems verysense it will be caused as I mentionedbefore the wage rates are beginning toshow signs of moving and you cannot havereal wages rising without it ultimatelythink if they continue on the road wouldthat we willgoing Pretlow I should say that thepresident wants to go we’re gonna end upwith a very significant budget deficitand very significant inflationultimately not not in the short termthat it takes a whilepolitical system doesn’t care aboutdeficits what they do care about isinflation when the inflation rate was 4%in the 1970sPresident Nixon imposed wage and pricecontrols were nowhere near there yet butit’s wrong our wayif we are though heading towards apotential rise in inflation rise in debtat a time of growing populism do youthink there’s a chance that the FederalReserve will lose independence I’mtrying to follow you which I mean wellcheating is a chance at Congress or thepresident will try to control theFederal Reserve or take away some of itsindependence I really don’t know one ofthose forecasting aspects which isdifficult another question from theaudience as the Federal Reserve’s reachgrows do you think that leged ofoversight will become necessary againthat’s above my pay gradeor do you think that Congress shouldexert more control or oversight of theFed I think the Federal Reserve is bystatuteremember the Federal Reserve Act of 1913which essentially did something veryunusual we had a long period wediscussed this in the book in whichfinancial crises kept surging up andthen collapsing which is a typical cyclewithwhich went on to a decade upon decadeand the populism that evolved as aconsequence of this looked atever-increasing lead to find a way tosolve the problem of why the crisesoccur and the general solution was ifthe economy is accelerating and it’srunning out of gold species and you’regoing to get into a situation in whichthey are always going to be crises sowhat the Federal Reserve Act actuallydid was very very interesting itsubstituted the sovereign credit of theUnited States for gold and then if no westayed on the gold standard technicallythat was a major change in Americanfinancial history and debate the basicconsequence of that is that FederalReserve determines what in effect is asensible level of money supply expansionand one of the reasons the FederalReserve Act was actually passed was toprevent the political system whenbecoming so very dominant in determiningmonetary policy which is exactly whatyou don’t want to happen and I mean Iwas you know eighteen and a half yearsas you mentioned getting letters fromeverybody who won very littlecongressmen or otherwise who wants it’sa the issue of and don’t worry about theissue of inflationand nobody was well when I would begetting people who say we want lowerinterest rates I got tons of that mail Inever got a single letter saying pleaseraise them and it tells you that thereare some views which go against realityand reality always wins but if you lookat that the history of populism some ofthe worst populism you got was in the1970s some of the work that the angerthat was generated by inflation in thenineteen seventies were roiled right theway through the political systemeventually leads to the rise of ofRonald Reagan because and who comes inand then you know crushes crushesinflation so inflation is is not asolution to populism it drivers it makespeople very angry do you think thecurrent populism is going to get worsechairman Greenspan well let’s rememberwhere populism comes from it’s I don’tknow whether this is a generalproposition but I find it’s difficult toget around the answer that when theinflation rate or that must theinflation ratings as much as the levelsof income slow down when you getproductivity for example which is thatthe major determinant of income and youget productivity slowing down you get amuch lower increase in JD GDP and grossdomestic income and wages and salariesalike and there’s a great deal of uneasein the population which is saying thingsare not good somebody come help us andsomebody necessarily on the white horsebecause comes up and says I’ve got a wayto handle this and if you look at LatinAmerica the history ofgoodly part of Latin America is aremarkable amount of people like Peroncoming in and all the subsequent postWorld War two governments in LatinAmerica and it’s really quiteunfortunate and surprising it’s not thatthey try it and it fails which it doesalways it always fails but it doesn’teliminate the desire to do it in otherwords of Peru Brazil and like they’veall undergone very significant periodsof huge inflation and collapsing andnobody wears a lessonyeah well we’re almost out of time butthere’s one other question from theaudience which I think cuts to the heartof a lot of what we’re talking aboutright now which is this does the successof capitalism come at the cost ofenormous wealth disparity is it possibleto have this vision of creativedestruction of capitalism of dynamismwithout having massive income inequalityI doubt it and I doubt it for the reasonI said earlier namely that we’ve got theproblem that human beings don’t changebut technology as it advances and it’sembodied in the growth of an economy isalways growing and when you havesomething that’s growing and the otherthing that’s flat you get obviouslyinequality and the politicalconsequences of that can I qualify thatjust a little bit I mean there – thereare different sorts of inequalitythere’s a there’s the inequality thatyou get from suddenly like Bill Gates orSteve Jobs producing a fantastic newinnovation and idea which means thatthey reap a lot of rewardfor that but which means that society asa whole gets richer and better off andthere’s the inequality that comes fromcrony capitalism from people usingpolitical influence blocking innovationand and sucking out and do rewards forthemselves so I think we need to beabsolutely very very sensitive to thewrong source of inequality whilecelebrating the right sort of inequalityand also had that Joseph Schumpeter thatgreat man once said that the the natureof capitalist progress doesn’t consistof Queens having a million or twomillion pairs of silk stockings itconsists of what used to be theprerogative of a queen being spreadthroughout the whole of society silkstockings you know that become somethingthat go from being very rare and onlyworn by Queens to being worn by allsorts of people all over the place soit’s the nature of capitalism is tocreate new innovations which are atfirst rare but spread throughout thewhole of society and everybody uses soif you think think of the the iPhone orsomething like that some that wassomething that was incredibly rare and afew people had those sort ofcommunications vais now everybodycarries them around all the time and thegreat capitalists the Bill Gates theSteve Jobs don’t get rich by selling onereally really good iPhone to one purposeand they get into selling their productsto all sorts of people so there’s asense in which there is no realtrade-off between very rich peoplegetting very rich and the rest ofsociety getting getting better off youknow they only get rich because theycreate things which everybody mostpeople want to have and buy you knowit’s it’s it’s it’s the Silk Stockingquestion really I you know I accept thatqualifications let me just say one thingyou going back to his mentioning hereWalter Isaacson’s book on innovation hewrote that book and I remember readingit and my final conclusion was and Iasked him why is it that most innovationis in the United Statesit’s American and he said you know I’venever thought of that I don’t think hewas aware of the fact that he here andall these innovationto developers and they all turned out tobe American which leads me to concludethat there’s something fundamental inthe psyche of American history in theAmerican public which creates it it’snot an accident which is why I won in itwho too often so which is what you ofcourse you sought to explain the book soif you had a chance to take this bookinto the Oval Office today or into theTreasury and give it to the Presidentand say this is a history of Americahere are the key lessons what is a topbit of advice that you would give to theadministration today to keep capitalismgrowing in America well you know we dohave we haven’t mentioned that there’san underlying financial problem which wehaven’t addressed in the best way todiscuss it as when I first became awareof itI would haven’t been looking at data andaccidentally created a chart whichshowed the relationship betweenentitlements spending which is socialbenefits in the rest of the world andgross domestic savings and I’m from 1965to the current period the ratio ofentitlements to the sum of those two isflat as a percent of gross domesticproduct which means or at least impliesthat one is crowding out the other andwhen you look at the individuals theyare actually looking different andenable one goes up the other goes downand so forth and I think that’ssuggestively the fact that there issomething in the sense of when we saythat entitlements by which a rising andthe baby boom generation is essentiallycrowding out gross domestic savingswhich in turn coupled withthe borrowing from abroad is how wefinance our gross domestic investmentwhich is the key factor in productivityright so entitlement reform well I lookforward to a tweet about entitlementreform I look forward to this veryimportant book being part of thediscussion about how to keep AmericaAmerica’s economy great and growing butin the meantime thank you both very muchindeed for sharing your thoughts it isindeed a fascinating book and quite anachievement and best of luck in gettingthis very important message out so thankyou both very much indeed[Applause]