That’s the upshot of a careful narrative
of the American government’s failure by James Fallows. The United States has had a sophisticated
pandemic detection and response apparatus since the George W. Bush
administration. Trump casually smashed
it, as he has smashed
many of the institutions that protect Americans from risk. The outbreak was in the President’s briefings
by early January. A normal
administration could have been able to secure Chinese cooperation to contain
the outbreak.
But of course this is not a normal administration. Trump never read his briefings. The few administration officials with an
interest in China are focused on trade, and have no interest in disease. Efforts by competent career officials are
stymied by the President’s allergy to bad news.
The Trump administration despises the career civil service, which it regards
as the disloyal “deep state.”
The Fallows piece is one of the most important pieces of
journalism I’ve seen in a long time, and I read a lot. It provokes two reflections.
First, political efforts to cripple the federal bureaucracy
are not peculiar to Trump, though he’s unusually unsubtle about it. They have become part of the ideology of the
Republican Party. The Republican
politician who has come off best in the age of Trump is Mitt Romney, who has
shown integrity and courage. But as a
presidential candidate, he said this: “Did
you know that government – federal, state, and local – under President Obama,
has grown to consume almost forty percent of our economy? We’re only inches away from ceasing to be a
free economy.” That’s a moderate
Republican. We would be freer without
roads, bridges, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, police, firefighters,
environmental protection. Of course much
of this is politically untouchable, so the drive for small government inevitably
focuses on spending that has no powerful protectors – public goods that benefit
everyone in general and no one in particular.
Such as the pandemic response apparatus.
Second, while I hate political polarization and work hard
to sympathetically understand the views of my political adversaries, it remains
hard for me to understand how any reasonable person could have voted for
Trump. Clinton was a boring, normal
politician, given to troubling cronyism but generally very competent. It was obvious during the campaign that Trump
was an impulsive, incurious, damaged, amoral sociopath who was utterly
unprepared for the responsibilities of the office. No one could have predicted the specifics of
the crisis that he would botch, but it was clear that America would have to be
very lucky to avoid disaster for four years (and that in any case that would be
four years lost in the face of impending climate change disaster). How could a vote for Trump have been worth
it? I ask merely for information. Trumpist friends, help me out here.