It has taken a good deal longer than it should have,
but Americans have now seen the con man behind the
curtain.
By Peter WehnerMarch 14, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - When, in January 2016,
I
wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican
who worked in the previous three GOP
administrations, I would never vote for Donald
Trump, even though his administration would align
much more with my policy views than a Hillary
Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican
friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a
person who checked far more of my policy boxes than
his opponent?
What I explained then, and what I have said many
times since, is that Trump is fundamentally
unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and
psychologically—for office. For me, that is the
paramount consideration in electing a president, in
part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect
that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and
at that point, the president’s judgment and
discernment, his character and leadership ability,
will really matter.
“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with
most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it
four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has
ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as
indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his
benightedness.” I added this:
Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of
ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy,
solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than
result in a failed presidency; it could very
well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect
of Donald Trump as commander in chief should
send a chill down the spine of every American.
It took until the second half of Trump’s first
term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the
coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a
president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as
the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.
To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for
either the coronavirus or the disease it causes,
COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from
hitting our shores even if he had done everything
right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t
done anything right; in fact, his decision to
implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any
narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on
Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The
temptation among the president’s critics to use the
pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing
he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude
is never a good look.
That said, the president and his administration
are responsible for grave, costly errors, most
especially the epic manufacturing failures in
diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few
people, the delay in expanding testing to labs
outside the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These
mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the
curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a
false sense of security.
