The battle against COVID-19 required competent and steady leadership. To stop the spread of the disease, we needed our President to be honest, smart, and humble.
Honest, because we needed to trust him. We needed to know that what he was telling us about the disease was factual and true, so that we could make well-informed decisions to keep ourselves and our family safe.
Smart, because infections disease epidemiology is complicated and heady stuff. We needed a president who could read briefings and synthesize and extrapolate the relevant data. We needed a President who could sit down with scientists and 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 extremely difficult and would require Americans to work together in a coordinated and unified manner.
We needed honesty, intelligence, and humility from our President, 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 crippled 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 conman 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 