I want to hope that Donald J. Trump has turned the corner on this coronavirus matter, that he’s now taking it as seriously as it deserves to be taken.
I also want to believe the president when he says we’re in a war with an invisible enemy, a war he vows to “win.”
However, the turnabout has been so dramatic, so profound that I cannot stop listening to the nonsense he spouted not so long ago while the rest of the world was becoming rattled by the onset of the pandemic.
He went in just a matter of two weeks from proclaiming the pandemic to be a “Democrat hoax” to declaring war on this “enemy.”
How, too, can we forget what we have learned about how he dismantled the pandemic office set up during the Obama administration as part of the National Security Council? Trump took the office down, reportedly only because President Obama thought it was worthwhile.
Now we’re paying the price for such reckless petulance? Is that the deal? Consider what has been reported about how the Obama team sought to counsel the Trump team during the transition from one administration to another.
The Obama folks sought to brief the Trump folks about the potential dangers of pandemics, according to Business Insider. The Trump team, though, were disinterested in what they were hearing. BI reports that the new commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, actually dozed off more than once during the briefings he and others were getting.
As BI reported: “There were people who were there who said, ‘This is really stupid and why do we need to be here,'” the senior Obama administration told Politico.
OK, so it appears now that the Trump administration is starting — finally! — to understand the scope of the crisis that has erupted. I will remain hopeful that’s the case.
Why, though, did we have to endure the idiocy that came from our nation’s top government echelon?
