[Chicks]

Coronavirus lays bare all the pathologies of the Trump administration
By
Max Boot
Columnist
Feb. 26, 2020 at 10:23 a.m. PST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...aos-president/

Seeking to undo everything that his predecessor had done, Trump dismantled the epidemic-fighting infrastructure the Obama administration had built up at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security. One of John Bolton’s first acts upon becoming national security adviser in 2018 was to dismiss the NSC’s global health team led by Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, a widely respected public-health expert.

These moves are emblematic of the president’s contempt for apolitical civil servants who know what they are doing. He prefers unqualified political hacks whose only loyalty is to him rather than to the country. Many top administration posts are already filled by “acting” placeholders while further purges are being launched by the new head of presidential personnel, the president’s 29-year-old former “body man” (i.e., gofer), John McEntee, with the assistance of a 23-year-old college senior.

Even as America mobilizes against a global epidemic — soon to be a pandemic, according to a former CDC director — two-thirds of the top jobs at DHS are devoid of Senate-approved appointees. The second acting secretary in a row, Chad Wolf, inspired incredulity from both Republicans and Democrats with his Senate testimony on Tuesday. He claimed the mortality rate for covid-19 is around 2 percent — roughly the same, he said, as the common flu. In fact, the mortality rate for influenza is around 0.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the acting deputy secretary, arch-nativist Ken Cuccinelli, took to Twitter to ask for the public’s help in accessing an online map from Johns Hopkins University tracking the virus’s spread. Imagine if the head of U.S. Strategic Command asked the public for helping in learning about nuclear weapons, and you start to comprehend the scale of the problem.

Trump was said to be furious that the State Department had overruled the CDC and flown 14 sick Americans home from Japan on aircraft with healthy passengers. He wasn’t notified until after the fact, and neither were some members of his coronavirus task force. The “chaos president” will try to find scapegoats, but he has no one but himself to blame for this chaotic response. He can’t figure out how to spell “coronavirus,” much less how to fight it.

At a time like this, it would be a lot more reassuring to think that there were actual, you know, experts in charge of the government rather than ignorant ideologues chosen for their dedication to a supreme leader unconstrained by fact, logic or morality. Where’s the “deep state” when you need it most?