By Bill Mefford
I have long been curious as to why the trump administration has been so dreadfully awful in responding to the COVID pandemic. It is not a surprise at their incompetence, which is a hallmark of this administration; they do almost everything badly except when it comes to committing acts of cruelty. They are very good at cruelty. However, their response to the pandemic has been especially horrid, even for them.
An appropriate response would have required good leadership and management and especially it would demand that someone allow people to function in their expertise. However, when you are an alpha male tough guy who loves to take charge, listening, managing, and leading are not things that come naturally.
It was expected that this administration would not do well when it came to an emergency, but they have far surpassed our horrible expectations. Not to minimize the pandemic at all, but it seems to me, a layman who was never particularly good at science, that the actions to have taken were fairly simple. First would be to listen to the experts. I mean, that is why they are called experts, right? When they warned of a pandemic coming back in December, that should have been the first clue to take action and to follow their advice and start preparing. I mean, it’s not like the guy in the White House has a lot on his plate. He just tweets and eats fast food most days with a couple of intelligence meetings that he tends to skip or not pay attention to.
But even if you are late to the preparation stage because you fired the people tasked with forecasting pandemics, when the pandemic finally hit the country in January there is still time to move. One thing that everyone has agreed was imperative in February was to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law used by the Executive branch to direct corporations to respond to national emergencies. This NY Times article states that “The Defense Production Act includes a range of authorities including issuing loans to expand a vendor’s capacity, controlling the distribution of a company’s products and the more commonly used power of compelling companies to prioritize the government’s order over those of other clients.”
This would have given great power to the Executive branch to make the necessary PPE and ventilators that hospitals have so desperately needed to combat this and properly care for those who are sick. If you nationalize some corporations and direct the coordination of necessary supplies like PPE and ventilators to the most needed areas while then following the guidelines established by the CDC rather than shelving their mandates, which is what this administration did instead, you still would have had a good chance to have stunted the spread of COVID. All the while, there should have been a heavy emphasis on ensuring that testing was accessible and available. There is simply no way you can effectively end what should be a national lockdown unless you are testing, knowing who is sick, where the hot spots are, and knowing when the trends are starting to turn in the right direction.
And when people get upset about being shut down, instead of fanning the flames of their ridiculous protests, you simply say that your hands are tied because you are following the experts and this is their call. You are called compassionate because your policies actually reflect compassion for people who are sick and the caregivers who are providing the healing. You are called an effective leader because you listened to the right people and you let experts do what they are best at. Yes, this takes a lot of work, but the thinking behind this approach is fairly straightforward.
It should not be hard to follow this. The politics are fairly simple. If you want to be re-elected into leadership, then show good leadership. And the best part is that this would have saved lots of peoples’ lives. God only knows how many. And if you save lives and you follow the advice of experts then you are regarded as a hero who is wise and thoughtful; just the kind of message you want floating around during an election year.
But this approach is an absolute impossibility with this administration. Wise and thoughtful ain’t trump. Instead, he and Pence are playing to their evangelical base and opting for a strong man approach – power through, refuse to back down - be a MAN! Don’t listen to those bespectacled know-it-all scientists who sit around all day in their lab coats. Be a man and refuse to wear protective gear – even when you are touring a factory that makes protective gear! Beating this is up to us with a little bit of faith in an American Jesus who will protect us and allow us to overpower this illness, conquer what challenges us, and capture our destiny. You can almost hear the action-hero music in the background, can’t you? Jesus was not a thinker – Jesus was an action hero, staring down death, casting all care aside, coming to the rescue of his friends, protecting the women-folk, and becoming the hero for all eternity. Jesus is the MAN!
Yeah, I have listened to one thousand too many evangelical sermons.
And sadly, watching the horrendous “leadership” of this administration, watching them bounce between cruelty and incompetence based upon a wretched theology of Jesus as the ultimate action hero I once again find myself coming to the conclusion that perhaps the biggest problem in this administration is that it’s foundation is built on a broken theology that is antithetical to the actual biblical life and ministry of Jesus. Bad theology - white, middle-class, evangelical theology - can have tragic consequences and we are watching this every day in real life.