The Trump Presidency Is Over
It has taken a good deal longer than it
should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.
March
13, 2020
Peter Wehner
Contributing
writer at The Atlantic
and senior fellow at EPPC
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.
The
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.
Peter Wehner
is a contributing writer at The Atlantic,
a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Egan visiting
professor at Duke University. He writes widely on political, cultural,
religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics : How
to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump .