Very good NYT read on what went wrong and how trump prioritized politics and didn't try to control the Virus. Also how the infighting among various dept heads led to chaos and ineffectiveness, until all were pushed aside for the Dr. Trump found on Fox News.
Trump’s Focus as the Pandemic Raged: What Would It Mean for Him?And since the Trump WH has a been a sieve and everything else that has come out has been verified, I'm pretty sure this is all true and will be (further) verified. Trump trashed too many reputations for folks not to talk and tell their side and try to make themselves look good/better.
Some key parts:
But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases.
I'd also add that testing was so uncoordinated and botched that most results took too long to become totally useless in terms of contact tracing or preventing a CV positive person from infecting others. It wasn't until what October? when the US started using the quick antigen tests which China relied on from the very start.
His concern? That the man he called “Sleepy Joe” Biden, who was leading him in the polls, would get credit for a vaccine, not him.
Threats of firings worsened the leadership vacuum as key figures undercut each other and distanced themselves from responsibility.
“Making masks a culture war issue was the dumbest thing imaginable,” one former senior adviser said.
His own experience to the contrary, he assured a crowd at the White House just a week after his hospitalization, “It’s going to disappear; it is disappearing.”
Somehow the Right prefers to use Trump's statement that the Vaccine would be available before the end of the year, instead of some other Trump quotes such as the above bit of errant fictive nonsense.
On Masks:
Tony Fabrizio, the president’s main pollster, came to the Oval Office for a meeting in the middle of the summer prepared to make a surprising case: that mask wearing was acceptable even among Mr. Trump’s supporters.
Fabrizio presented the numbers. According to his research, some of which was reported by The Washington Post, voters believed the pandemic was bad and getting worse, they were more concerned about getting sick than about the virus’s effects on their personal financial situation, the president’s approval rating on handling the pandemic had hit new lows and a little more than half the country did not think he was taking the situation seriously.
Fabrizio’s finding that more than 70 percent of voters in the states being targeted by the campaign supported mandatory mask wearing in public, at least indoors, including a majority of Republicans.
Mr. Kushner, who along with Hope Hicks, another top adviser, had been trying for months to convince Mr. Trump that masks could be portrayed as the key to regaining freedom to go safely to a restaurant or a sporting event, called embracing mask-wearing a “no-brainer.”
But Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff — backed up by other aides including Stephen Miller — said the politics for Mr. Trump would be devastating. “The base will revolt,” Mr. Meadows said, adding that he was not sure Mr. Trump could legally make it happen in any case.
Pathetic:
Some of the doctors on the task force, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, were reluctant to show up in person at the White House, worried that the disdain there for mask wearing and social distancing would leave them at risk of infection.
Dr. Hahn became disillusioned with what he saw as its efforts to politicize the work of the Food and Drug Administration, and he eventually shied away from task force meetings, fearing his statements there would leak.
Uh:
Dr. Atlas told Mr. Trump that the right way to think about the virus was how much “excess mortality” there was above what would have been expected without a pandemic.
Mr. Trump seized on the idea, often telling aides that the real number of dead was no more than 10,000 people.
Poll
5 (45.5%)