Watching the world COVID pandemic unfold over the past few weeks, first with scepticism, then with concern, and eventually, a sense of mounting alarm, I began to wonder - what is going to happen when this thing hits America given (a) its 3rd rate health care system, (b) their culture of favouring individual rights over the good of the country as a whole, and (c) the fact they have Trump as President?
Well, now we know. It's beyond question that there is a huge medical and humanitarian crisis coming over the next month.
When it had the chance to limit the spread, the US government's response, or more pertinently, the lack of it, was simply mind-boggling. At a point where Italy and Spain's situation was very publicly spiralling out of control but the US still had less than 100 reported cases, Trump as he often does ignored reality and released a series of tweets to the effect that the threat was overblown and the country would be over it all by the following Tuesday. So of course, everyone there went about blithely living their lives as usual.
As the days passed and while the Federal government dithered in terms of ramping up testing, imposing isolation and forcing manufacturers to produce medical supplies, state governors in densely populated states like New York, New Jersey and California had to take matters into their own hands. Without the ability to do blanket testing of patients, their only option was to tell people to get indoors pronto, and stay indoors. Sadly, looking at the growth in new cases, these measures look to have come too late and the genie is already out of the bottle. 310,000 plus cases this morning and growing in excess of 10% per day paints the grim picture. So who's responsible?
I make no secret of the fact that I despise just about everything about Trump the President and Trump the individual. However, I do understand his appeal to a certain demographic and why, prior to this happening, he was odds-on to get re-elected. In an increasingly globalised economy where traditional industries like manufacturing are disappearing offshore to base themselves in lower cost countries, and the old truism of the American dream whereby applying yourself and working hard, you can build a comfortable life for you and your family no longer holds, people of course get angry at their circumstances.
Anger, which of course was ripe for exploitation by an amoral snake-oil salesman spreading a message that it's all right to blame China, Mexico or other "shithole" countries for their plight and how he's going to make it all better by bringing all the old jobs back home. Which, of course, has proven to mostly a load of rubbish, but when overall, the economy is otherwise going all right and there isn't a major crisis to deal with, people who support him are happy to let it pass.
The problem though with the current situation is that all of Trump's worst characteristics - pathological lying, his contempt for experts and his total lack of interest in governing - instead of just being irritating to liberals, are now responsible for costing lives. In order to get on top of things, the government needed to pay attention to what the medical authorities were saying and take decisive action to minimise the spread. Instead, at White House press briefings, Americans got the all too familiar sight of Trump confusing the message by talking over the top of his advisers, playing down the problem and insulting any reporters who were trying to elicit detail about what the government was doing. Compare this to what happened in most Asian countries and here and New Zealand, where measures were swiftly implemented and cases look to be relatively under control. And now, in breaking news, Trump has put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of the response, a man for who the word "mediocre" could have been invented. Medical professionals all over the country must be pulling what is left of their hair out.
I have always found it bizarre how in most aspects of life, people generally insist on dealing with experts in their fields, yet particularly in recent times, when it comes to the electing governments, this logic goes out the window. Why? Anyone with any sense wouldn't let their appendix be taken out by someone with no medical experience, so why would you think that when you're faced with a national crisis like a war or a pandemic, a narcissistic crooked businessman with no track record or interest in public service is the person best placed to run the show? Sadly for our American friends, they're about to pay a terrible price for their choice. It's hard to see any of the US presidents of the last 40 years let a situation get out of control like this, but with Trump it was all too predictable what was likely to happen.
In an eerie kind of way, the pandemic has some similarities to the Vietnam War in that at first, everyone rallied round the flag, but then as the public saw the constant flow of body bags coming back on the planes and boats, public anger and protests mounted to the point where Lyndon Johnson saw the writing on the wall and chose not to run for re-election. I wonder what might happen in a few months when over 300,000 people have died and everyone in the USA looks back at what happened and realises that despite having another 4-6 weeks warning of the looming problem, their government still made a far bigger mess of the situation than the rest of the developed world.
It's not that an important a consideration when compared with the tragic and preventable loss of so many lives but maybe, just maybe, this pandemic will do what Russian collusion, blackmailing of the Ukrainian president and numerous other scandals couldn't, namely get rid of this unqualified idiot out of the White House. God knows the Americans deserve a whole lot better leadership than this.
