How not to run a government in a crisis

How not to run a government in a crisis has no better example than Trump "dealing" with COVID-19.

The Lie ...

“Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion,” President Trump said last month. He has repeatedly said that no one could have seen the effects of the coronavirus coming.

The response or lack thereof.

WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”

His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

Read the rest of the NYTimes piece and weep. How not to run a government in a crisis indeed.

And it's not over yet. Think if Trump opens the country up too early. I know I have.

Addendum: God has plans as well.

Donald Trump had such high hopes for Easter. So high, in fact, that when he burst forth on Fox News a couple of weeks ago with his idea of “re-opening” the country wide this coming Sunday, he gave it an exemplary rating of three “beautifuls”: “I just thought that it was a beautiful time …  a beautiful timeline. It’s a beautiful day.”

You could close your eyes and easily imagine what the president was envisioning: At a time of his appointing, on Easter Sunday, shop doors would be flung open simultaneously across America to great cheers. The people singing hymns in “packed churches” would turn their minds and hearts toward Trump and the miracle he’d wrought. Next morning, the stock market would rise like Jesus. And so it would come to pass that this Easter — Trump’s Easter — would be even bigger than the original.

It's like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure save that George Carlin isn't around to save the day.

Any questions :)