From Roger Fitch and our friends down under.

The war-time president

ROGER FITCH ESQ • TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 2020

Managing the pandemic in the US of A ... Letting the virus out of the bottle as the president bloviates and botches ... Ideology trumps science ... Misinterpreting the Defence Procurement Act ... Disbanding and closing programs for pandemic preparedness ... US manufacturers busily exporting vital equipment ... Oversight provisions in rescue legislation to be ignored ... Roger Fitch's Letter from Washington 

 

"I didn't know people die from the flu."

Donald Trump, unaware that Frederick Trump, his enterprising immigrant grandfather, died in the 1918 flu pandemic.

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"We've had a big problem with the ... woman governor ... from Michigan. We don't like to see the complaints ... Now, she wants a declaration of emergency, and, you know, we'll have to make a decision on that ... [but] all she does is ... blame the federal government."

Donald Trump, bullying a blue state governor through threats to withhold coronavirus aid.

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"They had things [in the Democrats' proposed legislation], levels of voting that if you'd ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." 

Donald Trump, conceding that improved access to voting during the pandemic would cost his party office.  

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Character is destiny, and America's kakistocrat president is dealing with the coronavirus crisis as only he would. The Post has an overview of Trump's shocking, dysfunctional response.

Mr Trump seized on the crisis, not to save lives, but to preen and bloviate about himself, and punish Democrats, too. For example, presidential declarations of a local state of emergency trigger federal financial support and assistance, and Trump has mostly green-lighted these for Republican states, while delaying them for Democrat-governed states. More here and here.

The government knew about the virus on January 3rd, had a CDC pandemic playbook to deal with it, yet outrageously Trump played down the danger, for over six weeks.

Soon after taking office, the Trump administration was warned by the Pentagon of an imminent epidemic danger; even so, the Trump administration closed down pandemic modelling by DHS in 2017. In 2018, the national security adviser John Bolton disbanded the White House pandemic office. 

In late 2018, Trump's administration received detailed plans, ordered by the Obama administration, for a new machine designed to produce millions of respirator masks quickly during a pandemic. The plans were discarded and the project abandoned. 

In 2019, the Trump administration failed to require the speedy delivery of low cost ventilators, developed by the Dutch multinational Philips under a contract funded by the Obama administration. Instead, the FDA approved the immediate sale of commercial versions, but gave Philips until September 2022 to supply the US. 

Philips stuck to its contract, absent the government's use of the Defence Procurement Act (see below), and its version of the government-funded ventilators is now being sold at an enormous mark-up around the world, with no priority granted to the US.

Other blunders: a 2019 pandemic exercise code-named "Crimson Contagion", simulated by the Trump administration's own Department of Health and Human Services, produced an alarming report on which no action was taken. Also, early intelligence reports on the government's frightening unpreparedness for a pandemic were ignored, despite Democrat pleas to act.

The president even toyed with letting the epidemic run its course, for the greater capitalist good, while some Republican senators with advance knowledge of the catastrophe sold off their endangered shares, buying into companies likely to profit from the crisis. More here and here.

Initially, Trump wrongly characterised his emergency powers under the DPA as "nationalisation", apparently to avoid civilian use of the Act; in fact, his administration has used the Act extensively for peacetime military procurement, including equipment for natural disasters.

Eventually, the president accepted crisis legislation that included a $500 billion discretionary fund that some feared was just another bailout for needy corporations, and, relaxing his ideological objections, allowed use of the DPA to procure ventilators from General Motors and others (including Philips) that he previously found too costly. 

While Trump dithered, US manufacturers exported critical equipment to buyers overseas. 

When crisis legislation was passed, it needed provisions to restrain Trump and other government insiders from profiting, and specified behaviour Trump was forbidden to engage in, e.g, diverting money to his Mexican wall. Still, there will be benefits for Trump, and in any case, he intends to ignore oversight provisions in the legislation (the House of Reps won't). 

In sum, President Trump, refusing any responsibility, has completely stuffed-up the virus response. 

Chances are, he'll get away with it. 

Just think. If the senate had done its job - removed the corrupt, incompetent Donald Trump from office - and afterwards, US marshals had succeeded in extracting him from his White House retreat, then the (comparatively) harmless Michael Pence would now be president, saving perhaps a few hundred thousand lives. 

With that in mind, an Intercept writer penned an open letter to Pence, encouraging him to move things along with the 25th amendment.