Every president chooses how to manage the flow of information. The consequences of Trump’s decisions are now becoming apparent.
President Donald Trump failed the defining test of his presidency in his Oval Office address on the coronavirus. He turned to a format meant to calm the nation, provide clarity, and offer a clear plan of action, but accomplished none of those things. On the contrary, he left Americans more anxious, more confused, and looking elsewhere for a plan.
As the first COVID-19 cases began to spread with alarming speed and lethality in China, President Trump evidently did not choose to make the issue a priority. Based on his public comments and Twitter feed, the incoming information that consumed his attention was more likely to come from cable television or political gossip than deep inside his intelligence briefings. Presumably, he also had a certain view of what he’d be doing in early 2020—chiefly, preparing the ground for his reelection campaign—and veering off course to prepare for a pandemic would have undermined those plans. A simple presidential communication of interest in a subject can set the government in motion, but in this case, that signal apparently never came.
Instead of seeing U.S. government expertise as a resource, Trump has routinely derided career experts as “deep state” operatives, insufficiently loyal to him and his agenda. Well into the COVID-19 outbreak, he said things such as “A lot of people think that it goes away in April with the heat,” or “This is a flu.” I doubt that any government expert would suggest that Trump say those things. The statements, instead, suggest a president either making things up or cherry-picking things he’s heard from nonexperts to offer false reassurance to the public.
By constantly trying to get himself through the news cycle, Trump has done irreparable damage to the long-term objective of ensuring that he’s a credible voice on the COVID-19 crisis. Time and again, he’s minimized the danger while talking up his own response, perhaps most notably when he said—speaking about cases within the United States two weeks ago—“You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” Statements like this no doubt end up creating hours of more work for his staff to explain or justify what is plainly false. More insidiously, this sort of talk could have contributed to the slowness to test and discover new cases which would plainly contradict the president’s own predictions.
At this point, the best thing that Trump and his staff can do is completely empower the experts to do their jobs. Give them the resources. Make them the communicators. Have them interface with the state and local officials who will now be on the front line of managing a response that has fallen so far behind where it should be. Let Congress address the obvious need for a stimulus that can minimize the economic harm that comes to ordinary citizens. Let the diplomats manage coordination with foreign countries.
No president can ever predict what crisis will consume his presidency, even if he can be assured that something will. What a president can do is run his White House in a way that gives him the best chance to succeed in a crisis. Because of how the Trump White House operates, it was set up to fail.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/white-house-set-fail/607960/