Randall Munroe’s
xkcd web comic for March 9, 2020 about a
scientific briefing (shown above) neatly sums up the Trump administration
attitude toward the coronavirus.
Back on February 26, President Trump held a 54-minute
press
conference on the coronavirus. On March 2, 2020 at the
Washington Post there
was
an article titled
Inside Trump’s frantic attempts to minimize the
coronavirus crisis.
On March 10, 2020 the conservative
National Review finally
had
an editorial article titled
President Trump needs to step up on the
coronavirus. In the sixth paragraph they stated the obvious:
“….The failures of leadership at the top, however, show no
sign of being corrected. In a serious
public-health crisis, the public has a right to expect the government’s chief
executive to lead in a number of crucial ways: by prioritizing the problem
properly, by deferring to subject matter experts when appropriate while making
key decisions in informed and sensible ways, by providing honest and careful
information to the country, by calming fears and setting expectations, and by
addressing mistakes and setbacks.
Trump so far hasn’t passed muster on any of these metrics.
He resisted making the response to the epidemic a priority for as long as he
could – refusing briefings, downplaying the problem, and wasting precious time.
He has failed to properly empower his subordinates and refused to trust the
information they provided him – often offering up unsubstantiated claims and
figures from cable television instead. He has spoken about the crisis in crude
political and personal terms. He has stood in the way of public understanding
of the plausible course of the epidemic, trafficking instead in dismissive clichés.
He has denied his administration’s missteps, making it more difficult to
address them.
This presidential behavior is all too familiar. It is how he
has gotten through scandals and fiascos for more than three years in office.
But those were all essentially political in nature, and most were self-created.
The country has been lucky in the Trump era, largely avoiding the sorts of
major, unforeseen crises that make the greatest demands of the modern
presidency. That luck has now run out, and this demands a new level of
seriousness from the president and those around him.
President Trump needs to rise to this challenge. His
partisan adversaries are sure he can’t. We hope he proves them wrong.”
If the Trump administration had bothered to ask the
Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) whether they had any advice about
crisis communication, then they would have been pointed to lots of very useful
information. CDC has
a web page about
Crisis and Emergency Communication (CERC)
with a link to a
462-page manual (from 2014) and a succinct
Pocket Card, (see page 174 in the manual) the
front of which is shown above. Back on May 30, 2014 I
blogged about Remembering
what is important in crisis communication – the CDC CERC pocket or emergency
card.
On December 31, 2019 there was
an article by Daniel Dale at CNN
Politics titled
A month-by-month look at Donald Trump’s top lies of 2019. He
counted over 2,700 false claims, or about 7.4 per day. Based on that record of
not being right, I doubt that the president can become credible. Rather than listen
to the president, I will look at
the coronavirus page at the CDC web site for advice
- including their
Steps to Prevent Illness.
UPDATE March 13, 2020
On the evening of Wednesday March 11, 2020 President Trump
spoke from the White House. An
article on
March 12, 2020 at the
Washington Post titled
Ten minutes at the
teleprompter: Inside Trump’s failed attempt to calm coronavirus fears described
what happened:
“In the most scripted of presidential settings, a prime-time
televised address to the nation, President Trump decided to ad-lib – and his
errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized
for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the
coronavirus.
Even Trump – a man practically allergic to admitting
mistakes – knew he’d screwed up by declaring Wednesday night that his ban on
travel from Europe would include cargo and trade, and acknowledged as much to
aides in the Oval Office as soon as he’d finished speaking, according to one
senior administration official and a second person, both with knowledge of the
episode.
Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser who has
seized control of some aspects of the government’s coronavirus response,
reassured Trump that aides would correct his misstatement, four administration
officials said, and they scrambled to do just that. The president also told
staffers to make sure other countries did not believe trade would be affected,
and even sent a cleanup tweet of his own: ‘The restriction stops people not
goods,’ he wrote.
Other administration officials rushed to alert the public
that U.S. citizens would be exempt from the travel ban, after scores of
Americans, upon digesting Trump’s speech, phoned government offices and raced
to airports in Europe out of concern that they would not be able to fly home.
Trump’s 10-minute Oval Office address Wednesday night
reflected not only his handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways,
much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic
in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the
supremacy of the nation he leads.
Futures for the Dow Jones industrial average fell in real
time with virtually each word Trump uttered, signaling a lack of confidence
among investors that he had control of the crisis and previewing another
bloodbath once the markets opened Thursday morning.
Trump – who believed that by giving the speech he would
appear in command and that his remarks would reassure financial markets and the
country – was in ‘an unusually foul mood’ and sounded at times ‘apoplectic’ on
Thursday as he watched stocks tumble and digested widespread criticism of his
speech, according to a former senior administration official briefed on his
private conversations.
This official, like many others interviewed for this story,
spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive information or make
candid assessments.
Ben Rhodes, who served as a senior White House aide and
helped former president Barack Obama script and manage his responses to
numerous crises, predicted that Wednesday night’s address will stand as ‘the
moment people associate with the fact that Donald Trump failed the biggest test
of his presidency.’
‘I think we’ll look back on this as a defining moment of the
Trump presidency because it speaks to larger concerns that people already had
about Trump – that he can’t tell the truth, that he doesn’t value expertise,
that he doesn’t take the presidency seriously enough,’ Rhodes said.”
