Donald's Governing Style

Is Donald Trump prepared to handle the coronavirus outbreak, if it does become a true emergency? Almost certainly not. In a post titled "Trump Laid the Groundwork for a Coronavirus Mess," and subtitled "The past three years are a lesson in how not to prepare for an emergency," Jonathan Bernstein explains why not:

It’s hard to imagine a president doing more to make himself vulnerable to damage from a viral outbreak than Donald Trump has over the last three years.

Yes, to himself. Also to the nation — that’s surely more important — but good presidents take care of themselves, too. Trump, for all his bluster, is putting himself at risk.

Let’s start with the obvious: Trump has almost never, since the very beginning of his presidency, spoken to the nation as a whole. His entire presidency is based on picking us-versus-them fights against various real and imagined enemies. Most presidents pretend to wait until the last minute to begin their re-election campaigns, using the time up until that point to attempt to represent the entire nation; Trump has been running for re-election from day one. (That is, when he’s not re-fighting his original election — something normal presidents almost never do.)

This divisiveness has helped Trump keep the intensity levels of his strongest supporters high. But it means a large part of the nation has tuned him out long ago.

Trump has also failed to forge any kind of working relationship with Democrats. To be sure, Democrats aren’t eager to work with the president. But Trump doesn’t even go through the motions of trying. So when a crisis does happen, he’s unlikely to produce a bipartisan response — which, importantly for the president, would yield shared blame if things were to go wrong.

Trump also has little regard for maintaining a reputation for honesty. This too has given him some advantages; most partisans (of both parties) tend to believe whatever same-party presidents say, and Trump doesn’t limit himself to the kind of stretching-the-truth spin that normal politicians employ. The downside, of course, is that only a fool would take Donald Trump’s word for anything — and everyone except his strongest supporters knows that.

Then there are his attacks on competent civil servants and even his own political appointees whose main fault is in following the rule of law. The deprofessionalization of the White House — and increasingly of the executive branch as well — may effectively reduce the number of people within the government willing to tell the president “no.” That’s a disaster in the making: Qualified professionals actually know how to do things, and they share expertise that makes it more likely the president will support policies that work.

What’s more, Trump doesn’t seem to pay much attention to governing unless an issue personally affects him, appears on a TV show he watches, or produces good applause lines at his rallies. Most of the rest seems to wind up in the hands of those within the administration whose bureaucratic skills allow them to build little fiefdoms in which to operate relatively unfettered.

Which is just an introduction to Trump’s budgets: It appears that for the most part he only engages on a few items, leaving acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney free to submit radical budgets asking for huge cuts to popular programs. Congress — Republicans very much included — ignore most of those cuts and consider the budgets dead on arrival. But Trump’s name is on them, which means that when he regularly (for example) demands large cuts in the agencies responsible for fighting epidemics, he’s vulnerable to political attacks.

Then there’s Trump’s knee-jerk resistance to emulating his predecessors, especially Barack Obama. While being open to new ways of doing things is a virtue for leaders, rejecting procedures that have worked in the past is, not surprisingly, risky. So Trump didn’t follow Barack Obama’s example by appointing someone in the White House with clear presidential backing to coordinate the government response to the coronavirus, which has already produced some utterly predictable misfires.

And don’t forget Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip style of communication. Normal presidents vet their public statements carefully; Trump says whatever is on his mind. This produces comments which experts find counterproductive. Indeed, one of the reasons to consult with experts before issuing statements is to avoid that kind of criticism, since the criticism itself makes things worse. That’s true even in the very unlikely case that Trump actually knows more than everyone else about the topic at hand, and of course it’s even more true if he’s relying on yahoos on cable television news rather than real experts.

Some of these things will actually make it harder for government policy to be effective. All of them increase the risks to Trump — both the risk of failed policy, and the chances that he’ll take the blame for anything that goes wrong. (This is the article in its entirety.)

Writing at Vox, Matthew Yglesias piles on:

Late last week, the US government overruled objections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on an airplane with other healthy people.

The Trump administration swiftly leaked that the president was mad about this decision, and that nobody told him about it at the time. That could be true (or not — Trump and his team lie about things all the time). But even if it is true, it’s a confession of a stunning level of incompetence. The president is so checked out that he’s not in the loop even on critical decisions and is making excuses for himself after the fact.

Resolving interagency disagreements is his job. But Trump has never shown any real interest or aptitude for his job, something that used to loom large as an alarming aspect of his administration. That fear has faded into the background now that the US has gone years without many major domestic crises (the disasters and failed response in Puerto Rico being a big exception).

The Covid-19 outbreak, however, is a reminder that it remains a scary world and that the American government deals with a lot of important, complicated challenges that aren’t particularly ideological in nature. And we have no reason to believe the current president is up to the job. Trump not only hasn’t personally involved himself in the details of coronavirus response (apparently too busy pardoning former Celebrity Apprentice guests), he also hasn’t designated anyone to be in charge.

Infectious disease response necessarily involves balancing a range of considerations from throughout government public health agencies and critical aspects of economic and foreign policy. That’s why in fall 2014, the Obama administration appointed Ron Klain to serve as “Ebola czar” — a single official in charge of coordinating the response across the government. Trump has, so far, put nobody in charge, even though it’s already clear that because of the coronavirus’s effect on major Asian economies, the virus is going to be a bigger deal for Americans.

The Trump administration has asked Congress for $2.5 billion in emergency funding to fight the outbreak. But this is just a fig leaf. The reality is this administration keeps trying to — and at times does — slash funding for relevant government programs.

Trump keeps slashing pandemic response

In 2005, during the H1N5 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development ran a program called Predict to identify and research infectious diseases in animal populations in the developing world. Most new viruses that impact humans — apparently including the one causing the Covid-19 disease — emerge through this route, so investing in early research is the kind of thing that, at modest ongoing cost, served to reduce the likelihood of rare but catastrophic events.

The program was initiated under George W. Bush and continued through Barack Obama’s eight years in office; then, last fall the Trump administration shut it down.

That’s part of a broader pattern of actual and potential Trump efforts to shut down America’s ability to respond to pandemic disease.

Trump’s first budget proposal contained proposed cuts to the CDC that former Director Tom Frieden warned were “unsafe at any level of enactment.”

Congress mercifully didn’t agree to any such cuts, but as recently as February 11 — in the midst of the outbreak — Trump proposed huge cuts to both the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

Perhaps because his budget officials were in the middle of proposing cuts to disease response, it’s only over this past weekend that they pivoted and started getting ready to ask for the additional money that coping with Covid-19 is clearly going to cost. But experts say they’re still lowballing it.

In early 2018, my colleague Julia Belluz argued that Trump was “setting up the US to botch a pandemic response” by, for example, forcing US government agencies to retreat from 39 of the 49 low-income countries they were working in on tasks like training disease detectives and building emergency operations centers.

Instead of taking such warnings to heart, later that year, “the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure,” according to Laurie Garrett, a journalist and former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

As it happens, the Covid-19 problem arose from China, rather than from Africa, where the programs Trump shut down were working. But now that containment in China seems to have failed, the next big global risk is that the virus will spread to countries that have weaker public health infrastructure, from which it will spread uncontrollably — exactly the sort of countries where Trump has scaled back assistance.

Meanwhile, to the extent Trump has done anything in the midst of the crisis, his predominant focus seems to have been on reassuring financial markets, rather than on addressing the public health issue. (Read more here.)

Finally, at least for now, consider this picture of Donald, taken today during his press conference in New Delhi, India: 

photo credit: AFP via Getty Images

His hair looks different, awful, really, with too much hair product on the side and some kind of weird part sticking out to the left of his ear. The skin around his chin and neck looks mottled, almost pockmarked. Mostly, however, I'm struck by his expression. He looks vacant and sheepish, almost childlike, as if he's making faces during a long event that he doesn't understand. I posted a similar picture, with similar comments, last February, click here to read that post.