Coronavirus exposes Donald Trump as unfit for office – Henry McLeish

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis has been full of mistakes, disinformation and propaganda, writes Henry McLeish.
Donald Trump speaks to the media on Sunday after the number of cases in the US passed 3,000 (Picture: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)Donald Trump speaks to the media on Sunday after the number of cases in the US passed 3,000 (Picture: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Donald Trump speaks to the media on Sunday after the number of cases in the US passed 3,000 (Picture: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

The coronavirus crisis has deepened following a week in which the US President indulged in “happy talk”, misleading statements, factual errors and exhibited a puzzling remoteness from the sense of crisis now gripping America.

Donald Trump’s making matters worse. Not for the first time, his recklessness and dishonesty were on full public display. His every thought, action and utterance on the coronavirus confirms an America without leadership and a White House that has become part of a propaganda machine with only one objective, delivering Trump a second term in office.

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After describing the virus as a Democratic Party plot, Trump has now declared a “national emergency” – another national emergency was when he bypassed Congress to get military finance to build his wall on the Mexican border.

His refusal to act early leaves Americans at the mercy of a pandemic, with deliberate disinformation crowding out serious advice and a serious suppression of the facts about its likely spread and deadly consequences.

America is unprepared to cope with the coronavirus and the US President is to blame. His behaviour makes the earlier case for his impeachment seem mild in comparison.

Trump’s path to four more years in the White House has been framed around several issues: an unrelenting rise in US stocks on Wall Street, which are crashing daily and triggering unprecedented circuit breakers in order to stabilise markets; a booming economy, now heading towards poorer growth and possible recession; and persuading Americans that a path of economic nationalism, isolationism and populism is the way to a prosperous and safe America.

But Trump has been fuelling the one thing that stock exchanges, markets and the economy don’t want – uncertainty. Pandemics do not recognise national boundaries. Blaming every other nation makes no sense other than to cocoon the President in his own seriously unhinged world.

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The lack of testing is a national scandal in the US. And Trump seems more interested in vaccinating the economy than he is in vaccinating people. As one critic suggested, “the President is no longer an aberration but an abomination” whose every excess is impacting badly on those who he said he would help. He declared private health insurance companies would waive ‘copays’ – fees over and above insurance – for testing and treatment, only to be informed that just testing would be covered, resulting in tens of millions of anxious Americans, worrying about getting the virus but not being able to afford the treatment.

Of continuing concern is the President’s endless propensity to deceive, by lying and deliberately spreading disinformation.

He said the virus was under control. No. But political considerations don’t require him to have any idea of the extent of the problem.

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Testing is available to everyone. No. Very little testing has been carried out.

People should go to work if they are sick. No. People should stay at home.

Trump is turning much needed public information into political propaganda. The White House is at odds with the health needs of America but fully in tune with Trump’s obsession with being re-elected.

A remarkable and exceptional abuse of state power helps us understand the deeper and darker motives that drive Trump’s obsessions, and helps highlight the narrow prism through which he views the rest of the world.

The phases of neglect are clear. Originally the coronavirus was about “happy talk”, which best describes Trump’s dismissal of the seriousness of the threat, comparing it with the annual incidence of influenza and telling people not to worry. Miracles and warm weather were his best predictions.

This was closely followed by it’s a hoax, a fake disease, a Democratic Party and liberal media lie designed to destroy his chances of election victory in November.

The hard-right echo chambers of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the thousands of local radio stations, throughout America, peddling Trump memorabilia and acting as truth-free zones also played their part.

Looking for scapegoats, not solutions, was next and saw the virus being compared with an alien or immigrant. Much to the irritation of the Chinese President, the coronavirus was first described as the Wuhan virus, then the Chinese virus. Unable to resist, Trump named it as the immigrant virus, the foreign virus and now the European virus, providing the opportunity for the President to talk about walls and building fortress America to fend off a virus-ridden world.

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Instead this virus is screaming out for international cooperation to defeat a global threat.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown led the global effort to tackle the Financial crisis in 2008; today there is no leadership, as populism and nationalism divide rather than unite the world.

This helps explain the EU travel ban. No prior discussion took place with the EU, countries, airlines, embassies or staff in the White House. Trump was seeking a scapegoat, a smokescreen and now he has declared a “national emergency” to make amends for his appalling lack of leadership.

The extent to which Trump is dividing America, on political grounds, is profound.

Last week a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent threat to the United States and more Democrats than Republicans say they are taking precautions. Another poll from Axios-Survey Monkey, more worryingly, found that twice as many Republicans as Democrats see news reports about the seriousness of the coronavirus as “generally exaggerated”.

Trump is politicising and weaponising a deadly virus, a once-in-a-generation pandemic. His propaganda is powerful.

But the President’s approach is endangering his base, putting the entire country in peril and ignoring global approaches to the pandemic. Max Boot, writing in the Washington Post, said: “To defeat coronavirus, we must first combat the mental afflictions– irrationality, conspiracy-mongering and Dear Leader devotion to Trump spread by exposure to right-wing media”. Steve Bannon once described the Trump strategy as needing to “flood the game with s***”. Mission accomplished!

The 25th Amendment provides for the possibility of a President being removed from office if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. Unlikely to happen. But despite Trump telling the US “relax, we’re doing great”, America needs some respite from this nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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