Dump Trump

Here is the President last night making a hash of his measures to meet the corona virus challenge:

He managed to get three things wrong in a short address, read haltingly from a teleprompter. Only a slovenly White House would allow such mistakes.

More important: he said nothing that even begins to repair the damage his Administration’s failure to test Americans from early on has done to prospects for containing the contagion. We basically have no idea how many people have been infected. Instead, Trump focused on economic measures intended to rescue the rise in the stock market that he likes to brag about. Most of that rise–83% as of tonight–is already gone.

There is no sign the slide is yet at the bottom, and the flood of news about school and business closings suggests it is not. The State Department, where I spent my day, has instructed most employees to stay home tomorrow. My employer, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has gone to remote teaching until mid-April (but we are on spring break next week). Let’s not even think about what canceling entry to the US for Europeans other than Brits means: there are 2-3,000 flights across the Atlantic daily. I don’t know how many of those are to and from the UK. Maybe 25% of the total? That would make a minimum of 1500 aircraft idled.

The steam is going to go out of the global economy quickly. Recovery depends on how quickly we get back to normal. At this point, it looks like weeks or months, not days, unless Trump gets lucky and the virus just disappears in warm weather, as he has predicted. Il get to 70 Fahrenheit here tomorrow. But even that won’t reduce the onus on his Administration for having mismanaged the epidemic from the first. In the meanwhile, thousands of people my age will have expired due to negligence. Fox News won’t be telling its viewers that however.

Americans re-elected George W. Bush after they understood that he had invaded Iraq by mistake (that’s the charitable version of the story). I suppose we are capable of re-electing someone who allowed an epidemic to spread out of control and grind the economy to a halt. But I certainly hope not. The corona virus should spell the end of Trump. If the Republicans won’t do it before the election–and they won’t–the rest of us should do it at the polls. Dump Trump.