I'll be the first to volunteer that Trump is not a particularly good crisis time leader - he doesn't speak well so whatever he says get garbled in the message, he's apt to launch down tangents when speaking (his obsession with TV ratings), and he's also prone to say whatever is on his mind the moment it comes to him - stream of consciousness speaking is not always good for leadership (the Twitter stuff can get thrown in here). In addition, he does have the handicap that he is absolutely despised by roughly half of the electorate, meaning anything he does will be instantly rebuked by that half of the country that is pre-disposed to resist him. Case in point, the travel bans on China and then eventually Europe - the arguments were that these were not measures that should be taken at all. Now we're debating whether they really should've been done sooner and more fully.UNI88 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 10:42 amSo you've got no one. Xi, Merkel, Macron, Trudeau all dithered but Trump is the bad one? Trump is a despicable human being but he was in a no-win situation. Either he clamps down and is accused of overreacting (as he was with the China travel ban) or he doesn't and he's accused of dithering. The Orange Man Bad crowd is going to criticize him no matter what he does and the Orange Man Perfect crowd is going to ignore or rationalize his mistakes no matter what. They're mirror images of each other.
The federal government could have done more to help coordinate state activities and purchases but leaving shelter-in-place and other restrictions up to the states was absolutely the right approach in my opinion.
With all that said, I'm still looking for what he needs to be doing that isn't already being done. We're in a tough spot here - there's no vaccine for this yet (clock's ticking, Big Pharma), so we can't eradicate this. We don't know enough about the virus to even know if herd immunity is a real thing (and there's evidence of people coming down with it again, so it's very possible that herd immunity isn't a real think with this virus). With that being the case, testing is immensely more difficult - what's the point of an antibody test if it doesn't matter if you have anti-bodies for the virus? And unless you're testing everyone every day you're going to be missing people who are getting infected. And on top of that you do have the real issue of economic depression that is certainly a possibility - how do you get 10M-20M people (if that's the real number) back to work in some capacity? I'm not seeing any other countries out there that aren't shutdown to some extent, so no one else has the answers right now.
Certainly are tough times, and they're made harder by having a leader who isn't particularly good at the imagery of leadership, coupled with a fanatical political opposition that is determined that him failing at leadership, no matter the costs, is the prime objective at this time.
