Skepticism of science
Impatience with health restrictions
Prioritization of personal politics
Undisciplined communications
Chaotic management
Indulgence of conspiracies
Magical thinking
Turf warsThe inside story of how we got to the dark winter of covidhttps://t.co/PD0tbHHsJw
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) December 19, 2020
I keep stockpiling stories too long for the daily link-aggregations, because there’s just *too much news* every damned day. But this Washington Post story is well worth the click (hell, the subscription, if you can get one) — “The inside story of how Trump’s denial, mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic’s dark winter”:
… After their warnings had gone largely unheeded for months in the dormant West Wing, Deborah Birx, Anthony S. Fauci, Stephen Hahn and Robert Redfield together sounded new alarms, cautioning of a dark winter to come without dramatic action to slow community spread.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among the many Trump aides who were infected with the virus this fall, was taken aback, according to three senior administration officials with knowledge of the discussions. He told the doctors he did not believe their troubling data assessment. And he accused them of outlining problems without prescribing solutions.
The doctors explained that the solutions were simple and had long been clear — among them, to leverage the power of the presidential bully pulpit to persuade all Americans to wear masks, especially the legions of Trump supporters refusing to do so, and to dramatically expand testing…
Trump went days without mentioning the pandemic other than to celebrate progress on vaccines. The president by then had abdicated his responsibility to manage the public health crisis and instead used his megaphone almost exclusively to spread misinformation in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
“I think he’s just done with covid,” said one of Trump’s closest advisers who, like many others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal deliberations and operations. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”…
Excellent (Horrifying) Read: Trump & His Cronies vs. the VirusPost + Comments (168)