Stop playing down the deadly threat of coronavirus, Mr President, and start telling Americans the truth - or it may cost you your presidency
By Piers Morgan
Daily Mail
March 9, 2020
'Face reality as it is, not as it was, or as you would wish it to be,' said the late, great business tycoon Jack Welch, who transformed General Electric into one of the world's most successful firms.
Welch sadly died last week, and his long-time friend Donald Trump paid fulsome tribute to him: 'There was no corporate leader like 'Neutron Jack', he tweeted. 'He was my friend and supporter. We made wonderful deals together.'
Today, the President needs to heed his wise friend's advice. Fast.
The coronavirus crisis engulfing the entire planet at breakneck speed is a very serious threat to human life, and nobody, not even the finest scientific brains, are quite sure how bad things will get.
That's why we're seeing worst hit countries like China and Italy desperately locking down entire cities to try to get on top of it, oil prices collapsing, and stock markets crashing to levels not seen since 9/11 and the global financial meltdown of 2008/2009.
In such moments of catastrophe, world leaders are made or broken.
Decisions they make either cement or destroy their future legacies.
This especially applies to US presidents.
George W. Bush, for one, will be forever stained by his appallingly tone-deaf response to Hurricane Katrina. And Jimmy Carter was voted out of office for failing to rescue American hostages in Iran.
Conversely, John F Kennedy remains revered for staring down the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. And Harry S. Truman is hugely admired for his decisive leadership to end World War 2.
Yet President Trump seems hell-bent on pursuing a very self-destructive course when it comes to handling the biggest test of his presidency, and it's one that could see him get kicked out of the White House in November if he doesn't stop it.
As with Carter's one-term demise, it won't be because Americans blame him for causing the crisis, but because they ultimately blame him for the way he dealt with it.
And right now, he is dealing with it very badly.
The most important thing for any president to do when a crisis like this begins to kill Americans is to impart accurate information to the public that matches up to whatever the country's chief medical experts are saying. And to remain calm, focused and avoid any hyperbolic rhetoric, good or bad, that might cause unnecessary public panic.
President Trump has done none of these things.
Instead, he's spent the past two weeks dismissing coronavirus as a nothing-burger, insisting the US has it completely under control, contradicting expert advice, and telling us all why he's a medical genius whose 'hunch' is that there's nothing to worry about.
Well sorry, Mr President, but this isn't a time for your hunches or demonstrably false statements.
This is a time for cold, hard, medical facts and scientific evidence.
On Friday, Trump stated that 'anyone who wants a test can have a test'.
Yet his own Vice-President Mike Pence, who is overseeing the White House coronavirus response, admitted just hours earlier: 'We don't have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate the demand going forward.'
'Things change in a crisis, the advice may change in a crisis,' Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told the New York Times.
'And so it's really important for the public to have confidence in the messages and the messengers so that they understand and believe new information and advice.'
How are Americans supposed to have any confidence when the President says one thing and his deputy says another?
The need for speedy testing is absolutely essential in fighting coronavirus, as it can focus attention on where it's needed.
Yet the Times also reported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its first effort at a diagnostic test kit, causing a significant delay, and then severely limited supply by imposing very narrow criteria.
As a result, when the first American cases began to appear, very few people were able to be tested. Indeed, the first US resident to contract the virus through community contact, in California, didn't get tested for four days after entering hospital even though doctors had requested a test.
As of this weekend, only 5,860 public samples had actually been tested, which is a staggeringly, shamefully low number for a superpower of 325 million people that's had three months to prepare since news of COV-19 emerged.
By contrast, China has tested millions and South Korea is testing 10,000 people a day.
Now the fear is that the coronavirus genie is out of the bottle in the U.S. and has been silently sweeping through communities in victims showing no symptoms, or through those who do but can't get tested, ready to erupt as it has in Italy these past few days to devastating effect.
And if that is the case then all the subsequent testing can do is offer a clearer idea of infection rates rather than enable officials to stop the outbreak in its tracks.
President Trump seems either in deliberate denial about this, or genuinely oblivious to the reality of what is happening.
As other countries race to shut down sports events, movie theaters, restaurants, public transport and other places where large gatherings amass, America continues to hide its head in the sand, hoping this will all blow over.
It won't. It's going to get a lot worse, very quickly.
This morning, Trump went on an angry defensive self-congratulatory tweet-storm, boasting about how well he is handling the crisis, and attacking 'fake news media and their partner the Democrat Party' for 'doing everything within its semi-considerable power to inflame the Coronavirus situation far beyond what the facts would warrant.'
He then quoted Surgeon General as saying, 'The risk is low to the average American.'
That last claim is probably true.
For most people under 50, in good health, it appears to be a relatively low risk virus.
But the risk for elderly and infirm people is extremely high, and the speed of infection of COD-19 - way faster than normal flu - and deadly severity of its impact on people in those group- far worse than normal flu - are genuinely scary.
In Italy alone, it has now infected almost as many people as SARS infected worldwide in its entirety, infections are rocketing higher every day, and the mortality rate is running at nearly 5 percent.
If the same thing happens in the U.S. then hundreds of thousands of Americans will die.
This eventuality would make Trump's 'there's nothing to worry about' rebound savagely and perhaps unforgivably in his political face.
(Ironically, Italy was the first European country to ban flights from China – which is what Trump boasts of doing in America to great effect – and yet it's suffered the worst outbreak in Europe.)
It doesn't take even a stable genius to work out why Trump is maintaining this 'nothing to see here' stance.
If coronavirus runs riot through America, and the economy, his biggest success story, continues to implode, then the President knows he could face the vengeful wrath of voters at the ballot box.
Even his die-hard base may drop their unwavering support if their relatives start dying and their business go bust.
So, the stakes are potentially very high for President Trump.
That's why he was even reluctant to let Americans off a cruise ship in San Francisco into quarantine, despite the risk to their health aboard a vessel with 21 confirmed cases of the virus - because he said he didn't want the number of reported US infections to rise.
Seriously, Mr President?
These people are not just 'numbers' – they're American citizens who have an absolute right to be back on U.S. soil.
To be perfectly frank, I don't care right now about what coronavirus means for Trump politically.
I care about coronavirus means for public health.
And the President's normal swaggering, loose-tongued, fact-challenged, wise-cracking style of leadership just doesn't work on something as serious as this.
On Friday, during his weird and woeful press conference, he boasted about having a 'supergenius' scientist uncle at MIT, and then said: 'I like this stuff, I really get it, people are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability?'
No offence, Mr President, but everything you're been saying about COD-19 to date suggests you have absolutely no idea what the hell you're dealing with.
As your friend Jack Welch said, face reality as it is, not what you want it to be.
I strongly suggest you stop your absurdly premature victory tour, leave the expert talk to the experts and start taking coronavirus a lot more seriously, before it's too late - for Americans, and for your presidency.
No comments:
Post a Comment