2 month later, Trump still doesn’t have a coronavirus plan| Trump Has No Plan

Here’s the reality: the lockout is fiscally unsustainable, so from now on, America can’t bear it until a vaccine. And you don’t have to take that from me. “You can’t be 18 months in the lockout,” says Dr. Michael Osterholm, founder of Center for Science and Policy on Infectious Disease. “As we say, we are trying to kill civilization because we don’t realize what we’re trying to do with it.”

And that is also the truth: Reopening without a means of managing the coronavirus would be dangerous to both human life and economic prosperity because an escalating death rate would push states back into shutdown. “We simply can not let the virus go,” says Osterholm. “Thousands of people will suffer and our hospital system will be shut down, not just for those with COVID but also everyone with a health condition.

“What we require,” he continues, “is a strategy.”

It is scary. More than 60 days since President Trump proclaimed the novel coronavirus a national disaster, there is still no specific strategic roadmap on what is to come next. “The shutdown is not intended to be a lasting state of affairs; it’s supposed to be a big pause button that gives you time to get ready for the next step,” says Jeremy Konyndyk, from the think tank at the Center for Global Growth.

Yet the Delay was lost by the Trump administration. The US should have established the surveillance, contact tracing, and quarantine systems needed over the last two months to successfully end the lockout and return to normalcy — as most of its peer countries have done. Rather Trump mixed discipline with showmanship, playing the tyrant on tv while refusing to perform the hard job. He ‘s got all the airwaves under control and abdicated his duties. As a consequence, the improvement America made toward the coronavirus has slowed, just though the lockout has thrown the nation into turmoil.

I sound more compassionate to the demonstrators than others, even those who want states to reopen, who think the lockout expenses are disproportionate despite the obvious benefits. The economic suffering is true and no way to foresee its conclusion, no simple explanation has been granted of the intent behind their sacrifice. But the terrible dilemma they say we face — between perpetual shutdown or irresponsible reopening — must be known for what it is: the inability of our elected representatives to build a more stable, halfway stage.

“What we hope to prevent in the reopening process is to establish the circumstances that caused us to have to remain home first,” writes the Caitlin Rivers at Johns Hopkins Health Protection Centre. That was the job of the Trump administration — they either had to or wanted help to convince the states to do anything.

We fell. This is the most serious and total disappointment in the history of Presidential leadership.

They are accustomed to public discussions over whether the president wants the correct strategy or the incorrect one. You may presume the condition here is this.

There is a range of proposals to restore them at this point from think tanks and researchers, policy-makers and epidemiologists, liberals, and conservatives. They differ in a way that is critical, divisive. There are proposals on mass testing which go all-in. Others think of a massive, automated security system. Others focus on states; some emphasize the position of the Federal government. And specifics worth exploring exist inside the plans: Which amount of danger is acceptable? Which advice would be special for urban towns and rural areas? Who finds a job indispensable? How to stop mass unemployment? What is feasible in the technical sense?

The Trump administration may have selected or created its own all of these proposals. But they didn’t. The nearest that has come is a series of protocols for contacting states before reopening. You will read them by yourself on the “Opening America” landing page of the White House. The recommendations are not exactly a strategy, but at least they are a framework: they call for states to reopen after caseloads have dropped for 14 days after clinics are willing to regularly monitor their healthcare staff, while touch tracking infrastructure is underway.

However, President Trump shows neither familiarity with his guidelines, nor support. He frequently calls for states to restart, even if they have not fulfilled the standards which his administration has suggested. For proof his string of tweets asking for “LIBERATE!” to right-wing demonstrators. “Stay-at-home directives from Michigan, Virginia, and Minnesota undermined his administration’s instructions and generated chaos for state governments struggling to tackle a crisis.

Americans don’t have a successful dictator, but we do have someone on Television portraying a weak king, so he prevents other politicians from performing their work effectively.

Many of Trump’s supporters also tried to portray the legislative reaction of the president — or lack of it — as a moral devotion to populism in the limited government. “He has offered federalism and private industry pride of place — welcoming the populism and talents of our great governors and mayors, our outstanding corporate representatives and talented businesses,” Christopher DeMuth wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

This is unconvincing but imaginative. Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics has drawn up a comprehensive blueprint that supports a federalist solution and illustrates how it could operate. If states want to assume the lead, they claim, the federal government will help them in three ways: organize the supply chain so that states will not end up in a ruinous battle of bidding against each other, issue the debt required to prop up state and local expenditures as revenue declines, and mobilize the immense research tools of the federal government to guarantee that the best possible data is collected

But that’s not happening now. He frequently calls for states to restart, even if they have not fulfilled the standards which his administration has suggested. ” Diplomatically, they avoid any mention of the ongoing attempts of the president to promote political strife toward the governors he dislikes.

Trump’s commitment to state criteria has been transactional rather than metaphysical. He was frank in his conviction that his government would only communicate with the Governors who respected him politically sufficiently. Trump claimed he had told governor Mike Pence at a news conference, “Don’t call Washington Governor. Your time with him has been lost. Don’t name the lady in Michigan.'” The Trump team is maneuvering through the grudges and desires of the president, in this, like with so much else.

States, too, have to work through the Trump administration to ensure that they react. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, told the Washington Post in a stunning revelation that after purchasing 500,000 tests from South Korea, he made sure that the plane carrying the tests arrived under the safety of state troops because he believed the federal government might seize the tests it had struggled to obtain for itself. The step allegedly irritated Trump, who “saw the agreement with South Korea through Maryland as an attempt to shame the president.”

This is not a man that trusts in federalism, to say the obvious.

Forget a plan. There’s not even a goal.
In reality, it is inconsistent down. So I’m told it all along.

As my colleague Matthew Yglesias suggested, a target hasn’t yet been selected by the White House — and thus by the government. The Trump administration has never determined whether the aim is “mitigation,” in which we slow down the transmission of the virus to prevent crippling the health system, or “suppression,” in which we seek to kill the virus to save lives. As Thomas Friedman writes not pursuing either goal; instead, officials are pursuing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the virus, and Trump “just hasn’t told the country or its coronavirus task force, or perhaps even himself.”

This, therefore, is the state of affairs: The White House has no strategy, it has no structure, it has no ideology and it has no aim. That’s not that such things are unlikely. There are hundreds of proposals flying about at this stage and thousands of governments selling templates she might pick from. The response from Germany was positive, and I’m sure officials will share the lessons they’ve learned. Professional baseball is restarting in South Korea, and so far about a dozen cases of Covid-19 have been recorded in Taiwan during May.

It’s not like the president is doing the wrong thing — he’s doing nothing essentially. Yet he has mixed a pragmatic passivity with the ability of a showman to control the story and the fascination of a professional street warrior with settling scores, and he makes the role of governors and mayors more challenging, not offering them what they need to defeat the plague, nor having them make their own decisions free from his intervention and criticism.

The consequence, as David Wallace-Wells writes in New York magazine, is that “the nation has done effectively zero of the requisite preparatory research needed to start reopening comfortably and returning to a reasonable sense of regular existence.”

Americans made tremendous sacrifices to buy their time in government and wasted that time. That’s why we ‘re faced with a deeply divisive and polarizing discussion about constant lockdowns and irresponsible reopening: the government has refused to do as successful regimes have achieved to provide a viable choice in many nations.

“It’s like the line from Lewis Carroll, ‘If you don’t know where you’re headed, every route can bring you out there,'” says Osterholm. “All right, I don’t know where we are headed.”