The American people seem to sense that Donald Trump led us to slaughter even if the polling questions aren't quite so edgy. Still, all that polling about Trump being "too slow" to act and the public's complete and utter distrust of Trump appears to be sinking in over at the White House.
"Trump’s aides and advisers inside and outside his administration now view disapproval of his preparedness for the coronavirus pandemic as his biggest political liability heading into the 2020 election," writes Politico. Whoa. Seems a little taste of reality has managed to infiltrate the West Wing. What a predicament.
But perhaps most befuddling for Trump and his aides isn't what he's already failed to do, but rather the critical hurdle to come: Testing. In multiple polls, the public has proven keenly aware that it isn't yet safe to reopen the country. Governors who represent the largest constituencies along with business leaders are rightly demanding a marked increase in testing before they commit to reopening.
So what's the White House working on? Messaging. Rather than actually formulating a plan to ramp up testing nationwide, they're trying to message their way out of the giant testing debacle Trump and his minion Mike Pence have presided over. Pence most recently spent the weekend selling the notion that testing was already "sufficient" to reopen businesses even though public health experts are uniformly disputing that assertion. Trump's message is more chaotic but it's still simply a message, not a plan.
“If the testing does not get sorted out as soon as possible, it will be another nail in an almost closed coffin,” one Republican close to the White House said, adding that messaging alone can't save Trump from culpability.
So far, Trump's only plan is to blame the governors, saying they're responsible for providing adequate testing. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan took that to heart and secured 500,000 tests from South Korea, which has done an excellent job of testing its population. After reports of Hogan's acquisition surfaced on Monday, Trump got pissy about it, saying Hogan "could have called Mike Pence" and "I don't think he needed to go to South Korea." It's worth noting that not a single Pence promise has come to fruition on the timeline in which he promised it.
At Monday's briefing, Trump also said his administration was "moving rapidly," promising they would soon be "doubling" the number of daily tests "if the governors bring their states fully online to the capability that they have." What does that even mean, other than, bottom line: It's still on the governors?
Oh, and Trump promised this too: "We have testing coming in two weeks that will blow the industry away."
So prepare to be blown away! Trump's got something in the works. Can't imagine why only 36% of voters say they trust what Trump says in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The same poll found that 76% of voters ranked the economy as fair or poor. So Trump's original strategy of running for reelection on the economy and judicial appointments is out the window.
To date, just over 4 million tests have been completed. That's almost as many as Pence said when he promised on March 10 another 4 million tests would be distributed by week's end on top of the roughly 1 million already in circulation. Almost. Or how about Trump's March 6 promise that “anybody that wants a test can get a test?”
That's not true now and it's never been true. And whatever the current rate of testing is, it's nowhere close to the number needed given that the U.S. population is roughly 330 million people. Two recent reports on reopening argued that the testing rate would need to be anywhere from 3 to 30 million tests per week to as many as 20 million a day. But that's only if Trump has any desire to reopen the country safely, which is clearly immaterial to him.
But the worst-case scenario for Trump's reelection (not to mention the country) is that his administration never delivers on their many promises for adequate testing and then a second coronavirus wave hits in the fall that proves as deadly or even worse than the first one, exactly as the CDC is now predicting.
It's been more than three months since China reported its first death due to the virus. What the heck will Trump tell people when he's had almost a year to get testing right and still isn’t even close?