Bill Straub: The jig is up and nearly everyone can see president’s coronavirus failure except Trump himself

Trump insists he is not responsible for the faltering attempts to master the crisis. Did he forget he’s the president? If not him after more than three years in office who should be held to account? Now he’s even taking a cue from Senate Republican Leader Mitch “Root-‘n-Branch’’ McConnell, of Louisville, and asserting that the impeachment proceedings may have diverted his attention to a certain degree, even though it didn’t seem to ruin any golf dates, political rallies or other events that carried dire consequences for the nation.

One can almost hear Jon Lovitz, as the Pathological Liar on Saturday Night Live, turning over the impeachment rationale in his mind, declaring, “Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

Posting Donald Trump at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is no longer amusing. It’s not getting back at the libs or unearthing the “deep state” or putting non-white citizens in their place. Soon enough the number of deaths from the coronavirus could exceed the 44,000 Americans killed in the Korean War in a breathtakingly shorter period of time.

But there he is on a daily basis patting himself on the back, blustering against those who dare criticize and mendaciously offering lie after lie about the situation, contradicting experts and boasting about the television ratings his near-daily assessment of the situation attracts.

His trail of failure is remarkably easy to map. As has been reported by numerous outlets, the outbreak was first detected in late December 2019 at a seafood market in Wuhan, China, and spread at an alarmingly rapid pace. The federal government was first notified about its existence and potential danger on Jan. 3. The first case within U.S. borders was detected a couple weeks later. The first death was reported on Feb. 29.

In a memo to the National Security Council dated Jan. 29, as first reported by Axios, White House economic advisor Peter Navarro warned that COVID-19 could result in more than half a million American deaths and cost the economy almost $6 trillion. In a second memo, sent directly to Trump and dated Feb. 23, Navarro expressed fear the virus could lead to 2 million American deaths.

Yet, from Jan. 3, the first warning about the disease, to March 17, after the Navarro memos, Trump did very little. The administration announced travel restrictions to and from China on Feb. 2 – three days after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. Trump has consistently cited the travel ban as an example of his quick and decisive action, insisting the U.S. was the first to move in such a manner, even though the record shows other nations acted in similar fashion.

And he ultimately called for a 15-day economic shutdown, hoping that, “By making shared sacrifices and temporary changes, we can protect the health of our people and we can protect our economy.”

Those “temporary changes’’ have been extended beyond the current date with no end in sight.

Trump persistently downplayed the threat. On Jan. 22, responding to a reporter’s question, Trump declared he wasn’t worried about the potential spread of the disease.

“We have it totally under control,” he said. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s — going to be just fine.”

Trump maintained that attitude for days on end. During a campaign rally in Des Moines, IA, on Jan. 30, he told supporters, “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. … we think it’s going to have a very good ending for it.” Three days later he told Sean Hannity, a right-wing fool with a show on Fox News, that, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” 

On Feb. 10, at a meeting with the nation’s governors, Trump predicted COVID-19 would magically disappear “in April with the heat.” And yet again, on Feb. 24, he dispatched a tweet asserting the virus was “very much under control in the USA.”

None of that, of course, turned out to be true. And a lot of it came after Navarro warned about the potential for 2 million deaths. The president apparently thought shutting the door on China would prove sufficient. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

So he sat on his hands.

Incredibly and almost laughably despite the seriousness of the situation, Trump now insists he was well aware of the dangers presented by COVIS-19 very early on.

“I’ve always known this is a real, this is a pandemic,’’ Trump said on March 17. “I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

How can anyone believe a syllable this man utters?

It was during this crucial time period, having been warned, that Trump morphed from a loudmouthed dope ranting at the end of the bar sort of president to a complete and utter failure, a man who refused to act even though the details were there before him, thus endangering the very people whose security is his responsibility.

There was no testing for the virus in those early days because the administration had made no plans for addressing a pandemic. Testing kits weren’t readily available, therefore rendering it difficult if not impossible to determine the extent of the bug’s spread and impinging any effort to isolate those areas of greatest concern. The federal government was slow to call for folks to remain in their homes for safety’s sake.

There is a shortage of respirators because the federal government let a maintenance contract lapse in 2018, rendering a large percentage of them unusable.

Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, wrestling with a growing number of cases — 425,107 as of this writing – found themselves without sufficient gear because the administration didn’t have the foresight to assure that personal protective equipment (PPE) was available. Now it has established a distribution system that sends the needed equipment to private sources, forcing states to compete with one another, forcing up costs.

That’s just a small part of Trump’s chaotic response. The result is the United States is bound to become the site of the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world.

COVI-19 was bound to cross the U.S. border regardless of who sat in the Oval Office. And you can say Trump is the victim of bad luck having the problem foisted upon him.

Regardless, he has failed to take the sort of steps any normal leader would in assessing the potential damage. Now more people are going to die than in a best-case scenario and the economy, which Trump has touted ad infinitum, is in a shambles.

Yet millions of folks still apparently feel he’s the best thing since canned beer and vote for him in November despite the obvious evidence that he is not up to the task and is making a horrible situation even worse.

God help us all.