Who's In Charge Here?
By Michael Winship, Common Dreams, March 21, 2020. ~ A number of years ago, I wrote a documentary about John Gardner, the remarkable public servant who served as President Lyndon Johnson's secretary of health, education and welfare. He later founded the citizen's group Common Cause and was, by the way, a liberal Republican, if you can remember a time when such people existed. We can thank him for the implementation of many of LBJ's Great Society programs, including Medicare and Medicaid.
Gardner told a story about when he and his wife were newlyweds and built their first house, a small bungalow in northern California. It was the Depression and the construction men were grateful for the work but one of them came up to him one morning and said, "Mr. Gardner, I'm sorry, I have to leave early today. The president wants to speak to me." It was 1933. Franklin Roosevelt had just entered the White House and the worker needed to go home to hear his Fireside Chat, the first of many radio broadcasts in which FDR calmed the nation about the economy, explained the steps he and his administration were taking and outlined the New Deal programs he hoped would restore financial health.
Roosevelt's tone was empathetic, reassuring and informed. In a word, presidential.
- Fireside chat with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the State of the Union, January 11, 1944.
Flash forward 87 years: Coronavirus and a president completely unpresidential, a man unable to cope with a crisis, a leader who has no idea how to lead and who lacks a corpuscle of compassion, lamely leaning on unseemly truculence and the spewing of erroneous narratives. There are the lies, of course, always the lies, each day adding to his running total of more than 16,000 falsehoods since taking the oath of office. Bess Levin at Vanity Fair writes that at Trump's daily coronavirus briefings, "at least half to three quarters of the claims that come out of his mouth are complete and total lies."
Lies about the number and availability of testing kits, masks and ventilators, the amount of supplies to fight the so-called "invisible enemy," claims of non-existent websites and of drugs and vaccines not fully tested or months away from being ready for actual widespread use.
Lies in which he claims that no one could ever have anticipated this situation. For now we know that, as per an investigative team at The New York Times, "Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action… the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address."
The article was headlined, "A Cascade of Warnings, Heard but Unheeded, Before Virus Outbreak."
What's more, Friday night The Washington Post reported, "U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen… despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans."
An official told The Post, "Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn't get him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red."
Add to this the backpedaling and flip-flopping—from "We have it totally under control" and "We're going to be pretty soon to only five [sick] people" to "I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic." The misguided braggadocio with which he rates his own performance a "10" and announces, "There's never been a President even close that's been able to do what I've done in slashing all of the red tape." There's misplaced and tactless pride, the hubris of observing in the midst of death that coronavirus has "created a number of new stars" in his administration, as if the disease is a Netflix series. And announcing in the middle of all this the release of Lebanese-American Amer Fakhoury from a Lebanese prison, boasting from the dais that his administration's record of negotiating hostage releases is "42-0."...
Read More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/21/whos-charge-here