Why Donald Trump won’t wear a mask

Donald Trump won’t wear a mask. This might seem trivial but it’s not. It’s symptomatic of a big reason this administration’s response to the Corona virus has been an unmitigated disaster.

The fact that the president refuses to follow the recommendation of the nation’s own Centers for Disease Control is emblematic of his massive abdication of leadership during this crisis. Leading by example is a cardinal principle. George Washington did not stay in Mount Vernon when his soldiers were crossing the Delaware.

The first responsibility of the commander-in-chief is the safety of the people. Donald Trump’s delusional minimizing of the gravity of the pandemic and his slow, weak, capricious, erratic response allowed the virus to spread out of control from coast to coast.

As of 9 p.m. Monday (April 6), 10,908 Americans had died of COVID-19, a disease that, only a couple of months ago, the president predicted would disappear as if by magic. By 9 a.m. Tuesday morning as I write this, the toll exceeded 11,000 and counting.  By noon, as I start to edit, the toll was close to 12,000. By the time this goes online, a total of 15,000 or more would have died.

A recent Boston Globe editorial said Trump has blood on his hands. It is no exaggeration.

Beyond his childish petulance, the reason Donald Trump has no interest in wearing a mask is because it doesn’t protect the wearers but only the persons with whom they come in contact. Given his track record, who could expect Donald Trump to inconvenience himself by wearing a mask just to protect other people’s lives?

If we know anything about Trump it is that it’s all about him. Worried only about his own interests—creating a smokescreen to conceal his wrongdoing in the Ukraine affair, avoiding impeachment and conviction by Congress, and paving the way to reelection by slandering Joe Biden—Trump took no notice when, as early as January, U.S. intelligence raised the alarm about a potential catastrophic pandemic.

The dye was cast. Under the headline, “The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged,” The Washington Post published a report detailing how and why it all went wrong.

Here are some of the key points:

“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.

“And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.

“Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just miraculously go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.

“It may never be known how many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, might have been prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent and effective. But even now, there are many indications that the administration’s handling of the crisis had potentially devastating consequences.

”[T]he United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.

“It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus.”

The Post’s indictment of the Republican administration in Washington echoes the public indictment of the Republican administration in our own state of Florida, implicit in comments by the Surgeon General, among others, and as reported in The Miami Herald, The Tampa Bay Times, and many other media.

The reason for Florida’s lax approach to COVID-19 appears to be that the GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, was using the same playbook as Donald Trump or even taking his cues from the White House. The result of this approach in Florida were similar as at the federal level—the spread of the virus. DeSantis declined to close the beaches, order a statewide shutdown of non-essential businesses, or issue a stay-at-home order. A formula for disaster.

“Coronavirus is killing us in Florida, Gov. DeSantis. Act like you give a damn,” was the title of a scathing March 22 editorial in The Miami Herald.

On April 5, the Tampa Bay Times reported that:

“Florida saw a pandemic coming. State leaders dismantled the programs to fight it.

“Despite knowing as early as 2005 that a mass pandemic could affect Florida, state leaders cut research funding, jobs and requirements to fight the disease to the fullest extent.

“Those cuts, focused on the bottom line, left the health department in a weaker state to fight coronavirus, according to former employees. For years, the department struggled to contain and investigate even smaller disease outbreaks.”

Beyond the non-existent leadership in Washington, Tallahassee, and other states with Republican governors, COVID-19 grew from a serious but controllable epidemic to a monster out-of-control disaster because, rather than governing for the common good, for decades the Republicans have been focused on the bottom line of the big corporations that form the party’s real base. The wholesale downsizing, dismantling, or disregarding of the work of those agencies of government at state and federal levels designed to serve as the first line of defense against pandemics allowed for a calamity on the scale we now face.

Blame Donald Trump, the Republican ideology of almost zero government in order to have almost zero taxes on the rich and corporations, Republican governors and other sycophants who would follow Trump inside the gates of hell, and that portion of the American electorate willing to elect a mean-spirited know-nothing in order to satisfy their grievance over having to “endure” the presidency of a Barack Obama, which they read as their no longer being the nation’s sole and undisputed top dog in the country’s race and ethnic hierarchy.