Matthew Yglesias: Coronavirus is the Trump catastrophe we've been terrified of

[babylonsister]

Coronavirus is the Trump catastrophe we’ve been terrified of
It’s Hurricane Maria all over again, but the storm is coming for us all.
By Matthew Yglesias on March 12, 2020 2:30 pm

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Thousands of Americans died because the confluence of events in Puerto Rico posed a genuinely hard problem. It was a big storm. It hit an island that had significant preexisting economic weaknesses including problems with its electrical infrastructure. The overall political situation there was bad for reasons that predated Trump and had little to do with him. But the president’s job is to handle hard problems. And he couldn’t do it. Instead, he whined, he lied, he bragged, he shifted blame, and in the final analysis, the suffering was enormous.

The spectacle left us with two options for hope. One, maybe the whole thing was a consequence of Trump’s racist and self-interested instincts. Maybe a problem that impacted a larger, whiter, and less politically disempowered population would get a stronger response. (To be clear: This is a deeply dark option.) Two, maybe Trump’s luck would hold up and he’d just muddle through four or eight years without ever facing a really big crisis.

But his luck has run out.

On Wednesday night, Trump took the rare step of delivering a formal address to the public from the Oval Office. It turned out to be a catastrophe. If you’d asked me Wednesday morning, I would have said, “How bad could 10 minutes of reading a speech from a teleprompter possibly be?” The answer turns out to be worse than I’d thought.

The entire focus of the speech was wildly misguided, focused on ginning up xenophobia and restricting travel from abroad when the coronavirus is already spreading seemingly uncontrolled inside the United States.

But even within the narrow premise that delivering an Oval Office address about new restrictions on European travel was a good idea, Trump screwed it up beyond belief.

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https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/3/12/21176750/trump-coronavirus-response-disaster?fbclid=IwAR17_VXhta3fVveXWYQKYYv32uQvva6NhVu5IT73VzH-urSOuSP22NFNHtU