This pandemic is Trump's Vietnam. He has earned his bone spurs.

Dana Milbank wrote a very well-reasoned comparison of Trump's reaction to the epidemic, and the Johnson administration's handling of the Vietnam War in today's Washington Post. Some excerpts:

In his ambivalent battle against the pandemic, President Trump has managed to repeat, in just a few months, the same mistakes that took three administrations more than a decade to make in Vietnam: ignoring experts’ warnings, running a confused war effort, spreading disinformation, silencing truth-tellers and squandering the prestige of the most powerful nation on Earth.

During the Vietnam War, as the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser pointed out, the U.S. military’s daily briefings from Saigon, full of false claims about progress, were dubbed the Five O’Clock Follies. Trump seems unaware of this ignominy when he holds daily briefings full of false claims and dubious medical advice — typically scheduled for 5 p.m.

In the Vietnam era, civilian leaders ignored the military and intelligence warnings that the war would end in stalemate or worse. Trump in January and February failed to take action on intelligence showing the threat posed to the United States by the pandemic. Likewise, he didn’t heed alarms sounded by White House official Peter Navarro, who pleaded in January and February for a massive response, and accurately warned that the virus could put millions of lives in jeopardy and cost trillions of dollars.

The Nixon administration moved forcefully to punish and to discredit those who revealed the grim truth about the war, even trying to steal psychiatric records of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Trump has sidelined inspectors general for the Pentagon and the CIA, and his acting Navy secretary (who has since been forced out) dismissed as “too naive or too stupid” the commander of an aircraft carrier. The commander’s offense: revealing dire conditions aboard his ship, where more than 170 have the virus.

H.R. McMaster, before becoming one of the four people to serve (so far) as Trump’s national security adviser, argued that Johnson’s mistake was to view Vietnam as a danger to his “domestic, political goals.” Johnson resisted calls to use overwhelming force in favor of “gradualism” because he didn’t want antiwar opposition to ruin his domestic agenda. Trump, similarly, has chafed at attempts to mitigate the virus, saying “the cure is worse than the problem,” and for a time attempting to “reopen” the economy by Easter. He still resists a national stay-at-home policy because of political and economic consequences, giving sanctuary to the virus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/07/this-pandemic-is-trumps-vietnam-he-has-earned-his-bone-spurs/