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As the coronavirus spreads, itâs increasingly clear that the U.S. government has made mistakes. This is a difficult time to assess those mistakes, however; itâs not yet clear, and wonât be for some time, either the extent or the responsibility for things that have gone wrong. Weâre going to see [more articles]( about how things went awry, and thatâs part of how democratic accountability works â moreover itâs an important part of how, in a democracy, governments are able to adjust course and get closer to successful policy.
So keep in mind when reading or viewing such stories that theyâre necessary, healthy and also probably at least a little sensationalized. They typically also fail to take into account that no response will ever be perfect.
Whatâs easier to assess are the public actions and statements of the president, and wow, is Donald Trump bad at this. Letâs take three recent examples.
One was [Trumpâs false claim]( on Wednesday that an Obama administration policy had made testing more difficult, a claim that was apparently just made up. So many things are wrong here. First of all, itâs important that people can believe the president during this kind of situation; obviously saying false things undermines that. Also, presidents are usually better off acting as if they are in command, as opposed to throwing blame elsewhere. And then thereâs Trumpâs choice to inject partisanship into the discussion. Itâs very simple: A presidentâs big advantage in difficult times is that he can claim to speak for the entire nation. Using partisan rhetoric squanders that asset.
The second episode? Trump went on Fox News on Wednesday night and gave multiple rambling answers to questions about the outbreak, at one point mentioning people who might go to work while mildly sick. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox [points out](, Trump was wrongly said to have advised people that they should go to work sick. He did not. He also didnât give the important message that people should stay home if theyâre sick, and he botched other parts of his answer, too.
This is typical Trump: Heâs âDonald from Queens,â the guy calling into a radio show to share whatever's on his mind or whatever opinion heâs come up with. Trump simply refuses to accept, and probably doesnât understand, that he [forfeited his right to mouth off]( on whatever he wants when he was hired by over 300 million bosses to take the job of president. And then on Thursday instead of correcting his inelegant answer, he instead [lashed out at the media](.
And the third one: Trump is still bragging about how successful heâs supposedly been at stopping the spread of the virus, even as the numbers grow and itâs increasingly clear that whatâs happened is a lack of testing, not a lack of infections. Thursday morning he boasted there were â[only 129 cases (40 Americans brought in)](.â By Thursday night, there were more than 200 reported cases. At least George W. Bush stopped at one Mission Accomplished rally.
This isnât harmless. While again Iâd caution against blaming the president for everything that goes wrong, and judging the government by a standard of 100% effectiveness, itâs still true that when a president downplays an issue it takes the pressure off officials to act as if itâs an emergency. And itâs not just federal officials: State and local governments, private parts of the health care system and ordinary citizens also take their cues from the president. If he says, in effect, that thereâs nothing to worry about, and that they shouldnât trust what they hear through the news media, then unfortunately a lot of people are going to believe him â and make bad, and perhaps [horribly dangerous](, choices.
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1. Trevor Cloen and Irfan Nooruddin at the Monkey Cage on [trade talks between the U.S. and India](.
2. Dan Drezner on [Joe Bidenâs foreign policy](.
3. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson on [the end of Warrenâs campaign](.
4. David A. Fahrenthold, Joshua Partlow, Jonathan O'Connell and Carol D. Leonnig are tracking how [Trump is putting taxpaper money in his own pocket](.
5. And Tony Lima on the [economic policy reaction]( to the pandemic.
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