EPIC TRUMP FAILS!! TrumpVirus / Racist Cops / The Depression Is Trump's Fault - But He's Afraid of Accountability - A Weak President

This Is Trump’s Fault

The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures


don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose 
Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his 
presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.

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Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By 
the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 
attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more 
Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have 
killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it 
will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier 
promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will 
have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.

The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, 
and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed 
country.

Read: How the pandemic will end

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness 
of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of 
stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let 
maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store 
sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s 
fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying 
many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. 
Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport 
crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of 
insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously 
go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state 
governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast 
beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, 
responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
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The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk 
radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of 
instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told 
those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the 
economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he 
had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his 
son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying 
opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about 
the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key 
government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s 
fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as 
commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.

For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way 
through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, 
every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by 
blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump.

Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are 
paying for his failures.

The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump 
administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on 
January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed in 
mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the first of 
a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to have 
succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the 
United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By March 
20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the 
day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first 
large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin marshaling a 
national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done 
over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said 
on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks between January 3 
and March 21.

Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over

Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no 
kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was 
little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, 
because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was 
under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, 
because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks 
placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the 
coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases 
anywhere on Earth.

Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path 
to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory. Statisticians 
cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the accelerating economic 
depression. It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 
percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and 
threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, 
maybe longer.