President Trump has blamed China, Obama, governors, the media and others for his administration's failures in the pandemic. But as other presidents learned, the buck stops in the Oval Office.
On the eve of the D-day invasion of France in June 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote down the words he planned to say if the largest amphibious landing in history failed on the Normandy beaches.
Hospitals are running low on masks and gloves? You’re just not bidding hard enough — and maybe the employees are stealing them.The federal emergency stockpile was disastrously low? That’s President Obama’s fault — never mind that he left office more than three years ago. Or, more creatively, the Trump campaign charged that it was actually Joe Biden’s fault.
Has the president ever acknowledged that he or anyone he appointed ever contributed to any of these problems, even inadvertently? If he has, I missed it — despite diligent and punishing attention to his marathon White House briefings.Meanwhile, the president has walked away from a list of promises he made to show how he was acting boldly to quell the pandemic.
Three weeks later, only seven such testing stations have opened, and most are restricted to first responders and healthcare workers. The website Trump described covers only five Northern California counties. Then he invoked it against 3M, demanding it stop exporting surgical masks to Canada and other countries. 3M complied but warned that it risked drawing retaliation from overseas that would end up reducing the supply of masks to the U.S. market.
To be sure, the federal government has done some things well as it has scrambled to meet an unprecedented public health challenge.
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