Washington Post
The worst president. Ever.
By
Columnist
April 5, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. GMT+3
Until now, I have generally been reluctant to label
Donald Trump the worst president in U.S. history. As a historian, I know how
important it is to allow the passage of time to gain a sense of perspective.
Some presidents who seemed awful to contemporaries (Harry S. Truman) or simply
lackluster (Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush) look much better in
retrospect. Others, such as Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, don’t look as
good as they once did.
So I have written, as I did on March 12, that Trump is the worst president
in modern times — not of all time. That left open the possibility that James
Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding or some other
nonentity would be judged more harshly. But in the past month, we have seen
enough to take away the qualifier “in modern times.” With his catastrophic
mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has
established himself as the worst president in U.S. history.
His one major competitor for that dubious distinction
remains Buchanan, whose dithering helped lead us into the
Civil War — the deadliest conflict in U.S. history.
Buchanan may still be the biggest loser. But there is good reason to think that
the Civil War would have broken out no matter what. By contrast, there is
nothing inevitable about the scale of the disaster we now confront.
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The situation is so dire, it is hard to wrap your mind
around it. The Atlantic notes: “During the Great Recession of
2007–2009, the economy suffered a net loss of approximately 9 million jobs. The
pandemic recession has seen nearly 10 million unemployment claims in just two
weeks.” The New York Times estimates that the unemployment rate is now about 13 percent, the highest since the Great
Depression ended 80 years ago.
Far worse is the human carnage. We already have more confirmed coronavirus cases than any
other country. Trump claimed on Feb. 26 that the outbreak would soon be “down to close to zero.” Now he argues that if
the death toll is 100,000 to 200,000 — higher than the
U.S. fatalities in all of our wars combined since 1945 — it
will be proof that he’s done “a very good job.”
No, it will be a sign that he’s a miserable failure,
because the coronavirus is the most foreseeable catastrophe in U.S. history.
The warnings about the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks were obvious only in
retrospect. This time, it didn’t require any top-secret intelligence to see
what was coming. The alarm was sounded in January by experts in the media and by leading Democrats including presumptive
presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Government officials were delivering similar warnings
directly to Trump. A team of Post reporters wrote on Saturday: “The Trump
administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the
coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of
the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus —the first of
many—in the President’s Daily Brief.” But Trump wasn’t listening.
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The Post article is the most thorough dissection of
Trump’s failure to prepare for the gathering storm. Trump was first briefed on
the coronavirus by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Jan. 18.
But, The Post writes, “Azar told several associates that the president believed
he was ‘alarmist’ and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the
issue.” When Trump was first asked publicly about the virus, on Jan. 22, he
said, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
In the days and weeks after Azar alerted him about the
virus, Trump spoke at eight rallies and golfed six times as if he didn’t have a
care in the world.
AD
Trump’s failure to focus, The Post notes, “sowed
significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public
health experts.” It also allowed bureaucratic snafus to go unaddressed —
including critical failures to roll out enough tests or to stockpile enough
protective equipment and ventilators.
Countries as diverse as Taiwan,
Singapore, Canada, South Korea, Georgia and Germany have done far better — and
will suffer far less. South Korea and the United States discovered their first
cases on the same day. South Korea now has 183 dead — or 4 deaths per 1 million
people. The U.S. death ratio (25 per 1 million) is six times worse — and rising
quickly.
This fiasco is so monumental that it makes our recent
failed presidents — George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — Mount Rushmore material
by comparison. Trump’s Friday night announcement that he’s firing the intelligence community
inspector general who exposed his attempted extortion of Ukraine shows that he
combines the ineptitude of a George W. Bush or a Carter with the corruption of
Richard Nixon.
AD
Trump is characteristically working hardest at blaming
others — China, the media, governors, President Barack Obama, the Democratic
impeachment managers, everyone but his golf caddie — for his blunders.
His mantra is: “I don’t take responsibility
at all.” It remains to be seen whether voters will buy his excuses. But
whatever happens in November, Trump cannot escape the pitiless judgment of
history.
Somewhere, a relieved James Buchanan must be smiling.
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