Make America Grown-up Again: Trump Presidency and trade-off between competence and charisma

By Stephen Adewale

Irrespective of the way U.S. President Donald Trump responds to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the country will never come out unscathed as the President’s belated, self-centered, haphazard, and tone-deaf response will end up costing Americans trillion of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths. Ultimately, the President’s erratic policy and response will further tarnish the image of the United States as a global leader. Despite his consistent denials, he will be held responsible for whatever happens to the country’s status in the post-pandemic days.

Since 1945, the United States of America’s enormous power around the world rests on one major pillar: competence. Aside from its overwhelming mixture of military with economic forte, the country possessed the biggest and most sophisticated industries, the world’s best universities and research institutes, and a terrain blessed with munificent natural resources.

The glowing reputation that the United States has enjoyed in the last 100 years was built around its competence. The competence led to the country’s industrial might and world-class infrastructure, led to the network of highways, roads, railways, bridges, skyscrapers, dams, harbours, and airports that amaze foreign guests upon their arrival. Victory in World War II, the creation of the Bretton Woods economic institutions, innovative acts such as the Marshall Plan, and the efficacious moon landing all strengthened an image of the United States of America as a place where people knew how to set aspiring aims and objectives and bring them successfully to realisation.

Furthermore, the sustained torrent of high-tech inventions, such as the computers, the smartphones, and all those ornamental weapons have made it possible for every world citizen to view and regard the United States as a meritocratic, gifted, and above all, capable and competent country.

Over the past 4 years, the United States has done an astonishing job of squandering that priceless and valuable reputation for accountable leadership and elementary competence. Since assuming office, Trump has perfected the art of lies, while gradually purging his administration of people with genuine expertise and relying instead on sycophants and praise singers.

In a speed of light, the coronavirus pandemic ensued, and when suddenly faced with a complicated problem requiring responsible leadership, it was inevitable that Trump would mishandle it and then deny responsibility. It is a failure of character unparalleled in U.S. history, and it could not have come at a worse time. The amazing thing is that anyone is even remotely surprised.

On January 22, a day after the American index case was announced, the President told Americans that there was nothing to worry about. According to President Trump, “we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” As the President was making this statement, experts and academic scholars were writing series of opinion articles to warn the country of the imminent danger.

Tom Frieden, erstwhile Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argued that America needs to be proactive and learn fast on how the diseases spread. In a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic”, Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb, two former officials in the Trump’s administration, argued that:

“The novel coronavirus…has features that may make it very difficult to control. If public-health authorities don’t interrupt the spread soon, the virus could infect many thousands more, disrupt air travel, overwhelm health-care system, and, worst of all, claim more lives”.

Epidemiologist at the State Department early cautioned that the virus might evolve into a pandemic, while the National Center for Medical Intelligence, a small branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency, came to the same conclusion. Peter Navarro, the president’s top trade strategist, wrote a searing memo arguing that should the virus degenerate to a pandemic, it could cost America dearly, causing as much as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses. While President Trump has denied in recent days that he had read the memo at the time, the New York Times, in its recent editorial, argued that the President did not read the memo, he was also upset that Navarro had put his ideas in writing.

Public health experts’ writings about how to get ready for this pandemic, notwithstanding, Donald Trump was still claiming that everything was alright. On January 24, the President tweeted that things “will all work out well.” Four days after, he retweeted a story being circulated by a conspiracy theory platform that “Johnson & Johnson to create coronavirus vaccine.” Even when, on January 30, the World Health Organization decided to declare the pandemic a “public-health emergency of international concern,” the President on the same day announced that America “have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”

However, the first major acknowledgement from the American President that there was a crisis came the following day when he declared that foreign nationals who had been to China in the recent days would be barred from the United States. But the announcement turned out to be unassertive as the policy never put into consideration the American citizens that may be coming in from China and other danger zones across the world.

Two days after the announcement of this policy, the President embarked on a showmanship on public television as the President announced on a Fox News interview that his administration has shut down the coronavirus “coming in from China.”

As that interview was ongoing, CNN was announcing that the coronavirus outbreak has killed at least 305 people and infected more than 14,500 globally, as the number of cases in U.S stood at 9.

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democratic Party Senator representing Connecticut, left a White House briefing on February 5, and tweeted:

“Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now”.

Finally, the fear of health analysts about Americans unpreparedness was confirmed on February 6 when the CDC started sharing test kits to laboratories across the country. Laboratories quickly discovered that the kits failed to produce reliable results. This technical flaw was a pointer to the fact that while other countries were producing reliable coronavirus test kits, Trump’s America was very sloppy about finding a solution.

At that point, the Trump administration could have started making use of operative test kits from the World Health Organization, but failed to do so. It could have removed protocols that prohibited private clinics and laboratories from quickly developing their own test kits, but failed to do so. The indecision and dithering eventually meant that the United States of America’s death toll would now overtake Italy as the world highest. This made William Hanage, a Harvard’s Professor of Epidemiology, to lament in one of his recent article on Washington Post that “testing for the virus might have stopped it. Now it’s too late… We just twiddled our thumbs as the coronavirus waltzed in.”

As if these challenges were not enough, American President spent the remaining first week of February reassuring Americans that he was on top of the situation. In a series of speech and interviews, he maintained that the warm spring weather could kill the virus. According to him, “looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” he stated this on February 10. In reality, the shortage of testing throughout February meant that the country would not know how messy the situation was, even when all the available pointers advised it was getting worse, quickly.

The officials kept expressing persistent concern about the lack of decisive action to deal with the virus. They assailed the lack of monitoring and helped bring questions about the virus being transmitted by people without symptoms to the government’s attention. Peter Navarro, President Trump’s Trade Adviser later lamented that “we have a relatively narrow window and we are flying blind. Looks like Italy missed it.”

For the next month, as the virus spread, Trump continued his optimistic valuations, even insisting on February 26 that the recorded number of cases was going down. Finally, on March 11, Trump addressed the citizens on the coronavirus. By then, his deportment had changed; he was finally taking the issue seriously, and he announced that Vice President Pence would be in charge of a special task force on the issue.

Two days after this announcement, President Trump doubled down on his conspiracy theory as he stood in front of the White House and promised the U.S. that Google was working on a website that enable every American, irrespective of where they live, to get tested.

“Google is going to develop a website… to determine if a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” Trump said at the press conference. “We cover very, very strongly our country. Stores in virtually every location. Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They have made tremendous progress.”

It is now clear that President Trump’s statement was far from the truth. A research carried out by The Verge, titled “Americans are still waiting for Trump’s coronavirus flowchart to become reality,” found that:

“Google was blindsided by the announcement; the 1,700 engineers were taken from a volunteer list. None of the company’s subsequent projects have offered anything like the comprehensive test promised by the White House”.

By the end of February, much time had been wasted on frivolities. Many prospects had been squandered. But even then, the damage could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his kitchen cabinet plunged deeper into another month of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.

Instead of looking for effective means of reigning in the coronavirus pandemic, the president’s top priority through February and March 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight. On February 7, Trump removed Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council. On February 12, Trump withdrew his nomination of Jessie Liu as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, apparently to punish her for her role in the prosecution and conviction of the Trump ally, Roger Stone.

On March 2, Trump withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to the post of Pentagon comptroller; McCusker’s sin was having raised concerns that suspension of aid to Ukraine had been improper. Late on the evening of April 3, Trump fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the official who had forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as the law required. This made the conservative writer, Windsor Mann, to tweet on that same night that: “Trump’s impeachment distracted him from preparing for a pandemic, but the pandemic did not distract him from firing the man he holds responsible for his impeachment.”

Through early March, financial markets weakened and then crashed. Schools closed, then whole cities, and then whole states. The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.

On the lack of testing equipment, he said on March 13 that the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration should be blamed for that. On his administration’s decision to dissolve the directorate of the National Security Council responsible for planning for and responding to pandemics, he said “somebody else in the administration” must have done that. On the reasons for ventilators’ scarcity, he said, on March 16, that procuring medical equipment was the governors’ responsibility, not his. On March 29, Trump maintained that face masks, gowns and gloves were running short in hospitals around the country because “hospital staff were stealing them.” On what led to the depletion of national emergency stockpile under his administration, Trump said the mistakes Joe Biden made back in 2009 should be held responsible for that.

The weeks of Trump’s denial and delay have triggered a desperate scramble among states. While the administration allocated medical supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the President also made the measured decision to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be circulated by commercial companies to their customers. This policy left state governments bidding against one another. On April 2, however, he denied encouraging competition among different states and tried to pin the ensuing panic buying on governors’ failure to build their own separate stockpile.

“They have to work that out. What they should do is they should’ve—long before this pandemic arrived—they should’ve been on the open market just buying. There was no competition; you could have made a great price. The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited. They didn’t want to spend the money, because they thought this would never happen.”

On the same day, he said the high number of casualties in New York was a result of New York hospitals who he accused of selling medical supplies through the black markets.

Incensed at the federal government’s failure to coordinate a response, governors have begun to clash with Trump. On March 16, Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland made the media rounds to complain about the lack of testing kits and to refute Trump’s claims of progress as “not true.” At one point, the New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, exploded in frustration that he would be “happy to do Trump’s job, too. Just give me control of the Army Corps of Engineers and I’ll take it from there.”

To worsen the already aggravated situation, CNBC’s publication titled “White House told federal health agency to classify coronavirus deliberations” made a shocking revelations about how the President ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified. An unusual step that succeeded in restricting information and hampered the American government’s response to the pandemic. That this could happen in a supposed democratic and open society leaves a lot to be desired.

Ironically, the same Trump who blocked the flow of information in his own country would later lament that he had been deceived by the Chinese government. “I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside,” he said on March 21. “We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly.”

If U.S. truly was so credulously ignorant as late as January 22, the fault should be laid at the doorstep of President Trump, whose administration cut down U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by more than two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 10 by January 2020, an important reason America found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration also defunded the system that entrenched an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again blocking the flow of information to the United States.

In the midst of this confusion, Trump is sacrificing American alliances abroad, attempting to recoup his own failure by turning predator on other countries’ medical supplies. German and French governments have had cause to accuse the United States of diverting medical supplies they had bought to the United States. On April 3, the North American company 3M publicly reprimanded the Trump administration for its effort to block medical exports to Canada, where 3M has operated numerous facilities for 70 years.

On April 5, India, one of America’s reliable ally and one of the world’s largest producers of pharmaceuticals, also had a diplomatic brush with President Trump over India’s decision to ban exports of hydroxychloroquine, an anti -malaria drug being touted as a possible coronavirus treatment.

India banned the exports on April 4 as countries globally stockpiled the anti-malarial drug developed nearly a century ago. However, on April 6, instead of appealing to India, the President resulted to threat. He said if India failed to “allow it to come out, that would be okay, but of course, there may be retaliation. Why wouldn’t there be?”

Then on April 1, Russia dispatched a cargo plane with masks and medical equipment to the US after Trump embarrassingly accepted an offer of humanitarian aid from Vladimir Putin to fight the coronavirus outbreak. In an apparent error, Trump said the aid had already arrived from Russia, telling reporters in the White House Rose Garden: “Russia sent us a very, very large planeload of things, medical equipment, which was very nice.” It was the first mention of aid from Moscow. What the President failed to mention, however, was the disturbing that the ventilators sent by Russia were manufactured by “Aventa-M,” a subsidiary of a Russian company that has been sanctioned by the United States.

The embarrassment was taken a notch further as a surge in coronavirus cases across the country forced different state governors to send demand for drugs, protective gear and other medical supplies to China. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has seen the most coronavirus cases in the US so far, called it a “real cruel twist of fate” that China is now the main manufacturer of ventilators and other equipment that states are desperately trying to acquire to fight the coronavirus outbreak. “It all comes back to China,” he said on April 8.

Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States fails miserably and is now looking up to other countries for medical relief.

How did the United States of America arrive at this contemptible juncture? How did it fritter away its reputation as the only country that knows the right step to take, and for being the only nation on earth that does things better than anyone else? Part of what drove America to this point is the hubris that comes from the country’s extraordinarily fortunate history. It has been by far the luckiest nation in the modern society, and Americans begun to assume that accomplishment was their entitlement instead of something that needed to be earned, cultivated, and protected. And with that complacency came a willingness to wager on absolutely untested and unproven leadership.

If the United States continues in this trajectory, America’s global influence will continue to take a downward slope. World leaders and people around the world will no longer take its ideas or advice as seriously as they once did. They will listen, perhaps, and they may agree with it from time to time, but the deference U.S. leaders used to be able to count on will fade.

Once coronavirus is over, Americans are likely to discover to their mortification that other voices and opinions are receiving more respectful attention in the international system. Whichever way things play out, it will be a different world than the one Americans have been accustomed to living. At the minimum, the far-reaching outlines of world politics will no longer pitch so heavily in the United States’ favour.

Stephen Adewale is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Society and currently serves as the Director of Africa Dialogue Mission, Nigeria