A timeline of stalling and failure to lead:
Where sources are
referred to, they are WaPo reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ellen
Nakashima, and Greg Miller, who have dogged this story from the get-go, unless
otherwise specified. Timeline data is taken from the Washington Post.
·
Jan. 3: The Trump administration received
its first formal notification of the outbreak in China. according to journalists
Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller. “Within days,
U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by
including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the
President’s Daily Brief,” they write. Advisers in the White House,
however, struggled to get Trump to take the threat seriously.
·
Jan. 18: The secretary of Health and Human
Services, Alex Azar, was finally able to speak with Trump, who was at
Mar-a-Lago, and provide him with his first briefing about the virus.
But the conversation was quickly derailed: “When he reached Trump by phone, the
president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products
would be back on the market, the senior administration officials said,”
·
Jan. 21: The first confirmed U.S. case is
announced in Washington state.
·
Jan. 22: During an interview, Trump told CNBC he
was “not at all” worried about a potential pandemic: “No. Not at
all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming
in from China … It’s going to be just fine.”
·
·
Jan. 29: The top White House adviser on
trade and China hawk, Peter Navarro, issued a memo starkly warning “that the
coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put
millions of Americans at risk of illness or death,” the New York
Times's Maggie Haberman reported. Trump did create the coronavirus task force
that same day, but he was still publicly downplaying the virus.
·
·
Jan 30: Despite recommendations from his top
health advisers against doing so, “Mr. Trump would approve the limits on travel
from China the next day, though it would be weeks before he began taking more
aggressive steps to head off spread of the virus,” per Haberman.
·
Feb. 5: Azar (Health and Human services) submitted
an emergency request for over $4 billion to the White House budget officials
after HHS leaders sent over two letters asking the office “to use its transfer
authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be
tapped for combating the coronavirus,” “Azar and his aides also began raising
the need for a multibillion-dollar supplemental budget request to send to
Congress.” A shouting match ensued in the Situation Room that day
in response to Azar's ask, our colleagues report: “A deputy in the budget
office accused Azar of preemptively lobbying Congress for a gigantic sum
that White House officials had no interest in granting.”
Feb. 6: After the World Health
Organization shipped 250,000 test kits to labs around the world, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention “began distributing 90 kits to
a smattering of state-run health labs,” per Yasmeen, Josh, Ellen, and
Greg. “Almost immediately, the state facilities encountered problems.”
Feb. 21: Dr. Robert Kadlec, the top disaster response
official at HHS, convened the coronavirus task force to recalibrate the
administration's virus response, according to the New York Times's Eric
Lipton, David Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael Shear, Mark Mazzetti, and Julian
Barnes. “The group — including [Fauci]; Dr. Robert R. Redfield of the [CDC],
and Mr. Azar, who at that stage was leading the White House task force —
concluded they would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing,
even at the risk of severe disruption to the nation’s economy and the daily
lives of millions of Americans.”
Feb. 23: Navarro penned a second memo that was circulated
in the West Wing, laying “the groundwork for supplemental requests from
Congress, with the warning: ‘This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse
trading on the Hill,’” per Axios's Jonathan Swan. In that memo, Navarro
predicted a “full-blown” pandemic “could infect as many as 100 million
Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”
Feb. 24: “ … Dr. Kadlec and the others decided to
present Mr. Trump with a plan titled 'Four Steps to Mitigation,'
telling the president that they needed to begin preparing Americans for a step
rarely taken in United States history,” per Lipton, Sanger, Haberman, Shear,
Mazzetti, and Barnes. “But over the next several days, a presidential
blowup and internal turf fights would sidetrack such a move. The focus
would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success rather than
publicly calling for a shift to mitigation.”
Feb. 6-29: The testing problems continued, and
it wasn't until Feb. 29 that the Food and Drug Administration issued a new
policy allowing private labs to proceed with their own tests.
Feb. 29: A Washington state man with an underlying
health condition became the first person to die of coronavirus in the United States.
March 11: Trump delivered an Oval Office address
on the virus in which he announced the ban of all travel from Europe for 30
days and called to buoy the economy. But the president still did not
recommend social distancing.
March 16: Trump agreed to implement new and stronger
guidelines issued by the CDC for Americans to practice social distancing and
avoid gatherings of groups of 10 or more people.
Simply put, despite warnings and suggestions by Public Health
professionals and his own appointed secretary for Health and Human services,
more than a month elapsed before the president took any meaningful action. Might
it have made a significant difference? We’ll probably never really know since
we are constrained to “reverse engineering" any such conclusions.
Seeing and hearing the drivel proffered by Trump, which
tends to revolve around the hyperbole of gratuitous superlatives laced with
references to “ratings,” one (if a historian of any acumen) is reminded of the
stark contrast between Donald Trump and another president facing a far longer (in
scope) national emergency.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was handed a national crisis, not of his making, different in origin and of far longer duration, but which had similar social
problems - loss of jobs, massive unemployment, general fear and uncertainty. He
dealt with these by using mass communication media like Trump. There the
similarity ends.
On radio, he (FDR)
was able to quell rumors and explain his policies. His tone and demeanor
communicated self-assurance during times of despair and uncertainty. Roosevelt
was an extremely effective communicator on radio, and the "fireside chats", as they came to be known, between
1933 and 1944 kept him in high public regard throughout his presidency. He
dealt in fact as much as possible and maintained a positive tone, ignoring those
who criticized for the most part without self-aggrandizement.
Though he
worked with speechwriters, Roosevelt took an active role in creating the chats,
dictating early drafts, and reading aloud revisions until he had almost
memorized the text. He was said to be fond of ad-libbing, explaining why
official versions of his speeches often vary from the actual recorded radio broadcast version. Trump also is fond of ad-libbing. We call those "lies."
An early
reviewer referred to these as “Fireside Chats”, although in reality, FDR was
seated behind his Oval Office desk, surrounded by a battery of microphones The
name stuck, as it accurately evoked not only the intent behind Roosevelt’s
words, which was to comfort a largely disheartened citizenry, but also by his informal,
conversational tone. Roosevelt took care to use the simplest possible language,
concrete examples, and analogies in the fireside chats, so as to be clearly
understood by the largest number of Americans. He began many of the nighttime
chats with the greeting “My friends,” and referred to himself as “I” and the
American people as “you” as if addressing his listeners directly and
personally.
Here is the opening of a chat of 14 April 1938:
“MY FRIENDS:
Five months have gone by since I last spoke to the people of
the Nation about the state of the Nation.
I had hoped to
be able to defer this talk until next week because, as we all know, this is
Holy Week. But what I want to say to you, the people of the country, is of such
immediate need and relates so closely to the lives of human beings and the
prevention of human suffering that I have felt that there should be no delay.
In this decision I have been strengthened by the thought that by speaking
tonight there may be greater peace of mind and that the hope of Easter may be
more real at firesides everywhere, and therefore that it is not inappropriate
to encourage peace when many of us are thinking of the Prince of Peace.”
See the part
where he says he’s “doing a great job and his ratings are high?” Me neither. And
he never did.
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