This Is Trump’s Fault
The
president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures.
APRIL 7, 2020
Staff writer at The Atlantic
“I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the
global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical
technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding
to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than
nations nearer to China. Instead, the United States will suffer more than any
peer country.
It didn’t have to be this way. If somebody else had been
president of the United States in December 2019—Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike
Pence, really almost anybody else—the United States would still have been
afflicted by the coronavirus. But it would have been better prepared, and
better able to respond.Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much
death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined
passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers.
He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United
States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus
had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.
At a session with state governors on February 10,
Trump predicted that the virus would quickly
disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you
know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat
comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though.
We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February
14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would
disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had
the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a
miracle.”
Those two assumptions led him to conclude that not much else
needed to be done. Senator Chris Murphy left a White House briefing on February
5, and tweeted:
Just
left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t
taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding,
which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening
staff etc. And they need it now.
Trump
and his supporters now say that he was distracted from responding to the crisis
by his impeachment. Even if it were true, pleading that the defense of your
past egregious misconduct led to your present gross failures is not much of an
excuse.
But if Trump and his senior national-security aides were
distracted, impeachment was not the only reason, or even the principal reason.
The period when the virus gathered momentum in Hubei province was also the
period during which the United States seemed on the brink of war with Iran.
Through the fall of 2019, tensions escalated between the two countries. The
United States blamed an Iranian-linked militia for a December 27 rocket attack
on a U.S. base in Iraq, triggering tit-for-tat retaliation that would lead to
the U.S. killing General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, open threats of war by
the United States on January 6, and the destruction of a civilian airliner over
Tehran on January 8.
The preoccupation with Iran may account for why Trump paid
so little attention to the virus, despite the many warnings. On January 18,
Trump—on a golf excursion in Palm Beach, Florida—cut
off his health secretary’s telephoned warning of gathering danger to launch
into a lecture about vaping, The Washington Post reported.
Two days later, the first documented U.S. case was confirmed
in Washington State.
Yet even at that late hour, Trump continued to think of the
coronavirus as something external to the United States. He tweeted on January 22: “China has been
working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly
appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In
particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
Impeachment somehow failed to distract Trump from traveling
to Davos, where in a January 22 interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box,
he promised: “We have it totally under control.
It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to
be just fine.”
Trump would later complain that he had been deceived by the
Chinese. “I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on
inside,” he said on March 21. “We didn’t know about it
until it started coming out publicly.”
If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January
22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating
inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important
reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World
Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an
epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again
obstructing the flow of information to the United States.
Yet
even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January
27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic
in an op-ed in USA Today. By the end of January, eight
cases of the virus had been confirmed in the United States. Hundreds
more must have been incubating undetected.
On January 31, the Trump administration at last did
something: It announced restrictions on air travel to and from China by
non-U.S. persons. This January 31 decision to restrict air travel has become
Trump’s most commonly proffered defense of his actions. “We’ve done an
incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said on February 27. “We closed those
borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned
out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,” he repeated on March 4. Trump praised himself some more at a Fox News
town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the next day. “As soon as I heard that
China had a problem, I said, ‘What’s going on with China? How many people are
coming in?’ Nobody but me asked that question. And you know better than—again,
you know … that I closed the borders very early.”
Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s
important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders
early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.
The World Health Organization declared a global health
emergency on January 30, but recommended against travel restrictions. On
January 31, the same day the United States announced its restrictions,
Italy suspended all flights to and from China.
But unlike the American restrictions, which did not take effect until February
2, the Italian ban applied immediately.
Australia acted on February 1, halting entries from
China by foreign nationals, again ahead of Trump.
And Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the
virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who
had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of
exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have
entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The
New York Times reported.
At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the
restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s
efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel
Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”
That same afternoon, Trump’s impeachment trial ended with
his acquittal in the Senate. The president, though, turned his energy not to
combatting the virus, but to the demands of his own ego.
The
president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from
truth-tellers in the impeachment fight. On February 7, Trump removed Lieutenant
Colonel Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council. On February 12,
Trump withdrew his nomination of Jessie Liu as undersecretary of the Treasury
for terrorism and financial crimes, apparently to punish her for her role in
the prosecution and conviction of the Trump ally Roger Stone. On March 2, Trump
withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to the post of Pentagon comptroller;
McCusker’s sin was having raised concerns that suspension of aid to Ukraine had
been improper. Late on the evening of April 3, Trump fired Intelligence
Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the official who had forwarded
the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees, as the law required. As the epigrammist Windsor Mann tweeted that same night: “Trump’s
impeachment distracted him from preparing for a pandemic, but the pandemic did
not distract him from firing the man he holds responsible for his impeachment.”
Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against
his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health
officials: Keep your mouth shut. If anybody missed the message, the firing of
Captain Brett Crozier from the command of an aircraft carrier for speaking
honestly about the danger facing his sailors was a reminder. There’s a reason
that the surgeon general of the United States seems terrified to answer even
the most basic factual questions or that Rear Admiral John Polowczyk sounds
like a malfunctioning artificial-intelligence program at press briefings. The
president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies
change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.
“Best
usa economy IN HISTORY!” Trump tweeted on February 11. On February 15,
Trump shared a video from a Senate GOP account,
tweeting: “Our booming economy is drawing Americans off the sidelines and BACK
TO WORK at the highest rate in 30 hears!”
Denial became the unofficial policy of the administration
through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s
surrogates and propagandists. “It looks like the coronavirus is being
weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Rush Limbaugh
said on his radio program February 24. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about
the coronavirus … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common
cold, folks.”
“We have contained this,” Trump’s economic adviser Larry
Kudlow told CNBC on February 24. “I won’t say
airtight, but pretty close to airtight. We have done a good job in the United
States.” Kudlow conceded that there might be “some stumbles” in financial
markets, but insisted there would be no “economic tragedy.”
On February 28, then–White House Chief of Staff Mick
Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, near
Washington, D.C.:
The
reason you’re ... seeing so much attention to [the virus] today is that [the
media] think this is gonna be what brings down this president. This is what
this is all about. I got a note from a reporter saying, “What are you gonna do
today to calm the markets.” I’m like: Really, what I might do today to
calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours ...
This is not Ebola, okay? It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS.
That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask
him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran,
and the first question today is not about Iran.”
Throughout
the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for
the president, has been the protection of his ego. Americans have become sadly
used to Trump’s blustery self-praise and his insatiable appetite for flattery.
During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly
strategic vulnerability for the United States.
“If we were doing a bad job, we should also be criticized.
But we have done an incredible job,” Trump said on February 27. “We’re doing a
great job with it,” he told Republican senators on March 10. “I always treated
the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the
beginning,” he tweeted on March 18.
For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit
for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010.
That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity
over the past three years. The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and
especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth. The economy
Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break
laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what?
Unemployment was down, the stock market up.
Suddenly, in 2020, the rooster that had taken credit for the
sunrise faced the reality of sunset. He could not bear it.
Underneath all the denial and self-congratulation, Trump
seems to have glimpsed the truth. The clearest statement of that knowledge was
expressed on February 28. That day, Trump spoke at a rally in South
Carolina—his penultimate rally before the pandemic forced him to stop. This was
the rally at which Trump accused the Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus
as “their new hoax.” That line was so shocking, it has crowded out awareness of
everything else Trump said that day. Yet those other statements are, if possible,
even more relevant to understanding the trouble he brought upon the country.
Trump does not speak clearly. His patterns of speech betray
a man with guilty secrets to hide, and a beclouded mind. Yet we can discern,
through the mental fog, that Trump had absorbed some crucial facts. By February
28, somebody in his orbit seemed to already be projecting 35,000 to 40,000
deaths from the coronavirus. Trump remembered the number, but refused to
believe it. His remarks are worth revisiting at length:
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know
that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great
jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not
good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their
votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their
votes.
One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President,
they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too
well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a
perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d
been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning.
Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.
But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15
people [sick] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went
early. We went early; we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing
great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The
Republican Party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never
been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a
movement.
So a statistic that we want to talk about—Go ahead: Say USA.
It’s okay; USA. So a number that nobody heard of, that I heard of recently and
I was shocked to hear it: 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu.
Did anyone know that? Thirty-five thousand, that’s a lot of people. It could go
to 100,000; it could be 27,000. They say usually a minimum of 27, goes up to
100,000 people a year die.
And
so far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it
doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared. It doesn’t mean we won’t,
but think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you
wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.
On
February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000
to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So
far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he
returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was
the media's fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you
wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”
By February 28, it was too late to exclude the coronavirus
from the United States. It was too late to test and trace, to isolate the first
cases and halt their further spread—that opportunity had already been lost. It
was too late to refill the stockpiles that the Republican Congresses of the Tea
Party years had refused to replenish, despite frantic pleas from
the Obama administration. It was too late to produce sufficient ventilators in
sufficient time.
But on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an
orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to
coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before
spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too
late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and
ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too
late to begin social distancing fast and early. Stay-at-home orders could have
been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.
So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many
opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been
limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of
lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.
On February 28, Eric Trump urged Americans to go “all in” on the
weakening stock market.
Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time
to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial
markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no
worse than the seasonal flu.
So
last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000
and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At
this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think
about that!
But the facade of denial was already cracking.
Through
early march, financial markets declined and then crashed. Schools
closed, then whole cities, and then whole states. The overwhelmed president
responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He
shifted the blame to others.
The lack of testing equipment? On March 13, Trump passed that buck to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and the Obama administration.
The White House had dissolved the directorate of the
National Security Council responsible for planning for and responding to
pandemics? Not me, Trump said on March 13. Maybe somebody else in
the administration did it, but “I didn’t do it ... I don’t know anything about
it. You say we did that. I don’t know anything about it.”
Were
ventilators desperately scarce? Obtaining medical equipment was the governors’
job, Trump said on a March 16 conference call.
Did Trump delay action until it was far too late? That was
the fault of the Chinese government for withholding information, he complained on March 21.
On March 27, Trump attributed his own broken promises about
ventilator production to General Motors, now headed by a woman unworthy of even
a last name: “Always a mess with Mary B.”
Masks, gowns, and gloves were running short only because
hospital staff were stealing them, Trump suggested on
March 29.
Was the national emergency medical stockpile catastrophically
depleted? Trump’s campaign creatively tried to pin that on mistakes Joe Biden
made back in 2009.
At his press conference on April 2, Trump blamed the shortage of lifesaving
equipment, and the ensuing panic-buying, on states’ failure to build their own
separate stockpile. “They have to work that out. What they should do is they
should’ve—long before this pandemic arrived—they should’ve been on the open
market just buying. There was no competition; you could have made a great
price. The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited.
They didn’t want to spend the money, because they thought this would never
happen.”
Were New Yorkers dying? On April 2, Trump fired off a
peevish letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer: “If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which
went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll
numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York
would not have been so completely unprepared for the ‘invisible enemy.’”
Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating
consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal
government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to
prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s
psychic needs as their single biggest problem.
As his medical advisers sought to dissuade Trump from
proceeding with his musing about reopening the country by Easter, April 12,
Deborah Birx—the White House’s coronavirus-response coordinator—appeared on the
evangelical CBN network to deliver this abject flattery: “[Trump is] so attentive to the
scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to
analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has
really been a real benefit.”
Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you
right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March
27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for
political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its
requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for.
The
weeks of Trump-administration denial and delay have triggered a desperate
scramble among states. The Trump administration is allocating some supplies
through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of
crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their
clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the
1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government.
In his panic, Trump is sacrificing U.S. alliances abroad,
attempting to recoup his own failure by turning predator. German and French
officials accuse the Trump administration of
diverting supplies they had purchased to the United States. On April 3, the
North American company 3M publicly rebuked the Trump administration for its
attempt to embargo medical exports to Canada, where 3M has operated seven
facilities for 70 years.
Around the world, allies are registering that in an
emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead.
Perhaps the only political leader in Canada ever to say a good word about
Donald Trump, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, expressed disgust at an April 3 press
conference. “I just can’t stress how disappointed I am at President Trump ...
I’m not going to rely on President Trump,” he said. “I’m not going to rely on any prime
minister or president from any country ever again.” Ford argued for a future of
Canadian self-sufficiency. Trump’s nationalist selfishness is proving almost as
contagious as the virus itself—and could ultimately prove as dangerous, too.
As
the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald
Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care
should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers
and lease payments with Palm Beach County.
He has never tried to be president of the whole United States,
but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent
has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining.
Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his
lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative
Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump. An Arkansas
pastor told The Washington Post of
congregants “ready to lick the floor” to support the president’s claim that
there is nothing to worry about. On March 15, the Trump-loyal governor of
Oklahoma tweeted a since-deleted photo of himself
and his children at a crowded restaurant buffet. “Eating with my kids and all
my fellow Oklahomans at the @CollectiveOKC. It’s packed tonight!” Those who
took their cues from Trump and the media who propagandized for him, and all
Americans, will suffer for it.
Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial
crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked
dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans
could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents.
Trump
has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has
always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic
vanity first.
Trump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He
has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He
has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural
committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical
and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take
that.
Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or
not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this
American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.
