NYT: Inside Trump's Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus

[teach1st]

Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus
New York Times, July 18, 2020

Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.

Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.

But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.

Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.

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Also:

Inside the Failure: 5 Takeaways on Trump’s Effort to Shift Responsibility

President Trump and his top aides sharply shifted their pandemic strategy in mid-April after seizing on optimistic data suggesting the virus would disappear, a Times investigation found.

[Laelth]

1. In other words ...

... they believed their own bullshite.

-Laelth

[tblue37]

4. They got high on their own supply. nt

[Laelth]

5. Just so. n/t

-Laelth

[Thomas Hurt]

2. yep, let the states handle it and blame everyone under the sun for it besides the Pig himself.

[CrispyQ]

3. The only thing he wanted to lead was the siphoning of the treasury

to his family, friends & supporters. And now Mnuchin wants to forgive some of those loans—probably the very ones that shouldn't have been given in the first place. And Pence has the audacity to warn about the coming SOCIALISM under a democratic administration. And the media never call them out on this BS.

[TomCADem]

6. In A Nutshell Trump's Sabotaged The Response...

...because he was impatient to goose the economy in time for the November election. Plus, he was trapped by his own statements minimizing the pandemic.