The battle against COVID-19 required competent and steady leadership. To stop the spread of the disease, we needed our President to be honest, intelligent, and humble.
Honest, because we needed to trust him. We needed to know that what he told us about the disease was factual so that we could make well-informed decisions to keep ourselves and our families safe.
Intelligent because infectious disease epidemiology is complicated and heady stuff. We needed a president who could read briefings, synthesize and extrapolate the relevant data, sit down with scientists, listen to what they were telling him, and effectively make sense of it so that he could communicate what he learned to the public clearly and concisely. Being able to do this would result in public confidence.
Humble because COVID-19 was an unknown and ruthless disease. What we learned early on was subject to change as new data became available. We needed a president who was humble enough to admit the challenge would be tough and require Americans to work together in a coordinated and unified manner.
We needed our President’s honesty, intelligence, and humility, and he was glaringly 0 for 3.
COVID-19 has killed more than a quarter million Americans. Tens of thousands of those deaths can be blamed on the incompetency of our President. It has wrecked our economy, devastated small businesses, and decimated families. It also shined a light on an immoral and criminally incompetent leader and, in all likelihood, ended the Trump presidency. In a weird twist of fate, if not for the virus and incompetent leadership that ensued, we might have lost our democracy.
What a devastating price to pay for electing a con artist and reality TV celebrity to the Presidency. I hope we learned a lesson as a nation – that cheap populism makes for a dangerously shaky and ineffectual national platform and that honesty, intelligence, and humility matter in a President.
bendingtheneedle 