The U.S. Needs a Leader — Not Someone Who Lies and Scapegoats His Way Through Crisis to Protect His Fragile Ego*
The United States and the world must have an American leader who levels with us, a leader who anticipates and prepares for and leads us through inevitable crisis, not a proven failure whose singular focus in crisis management is himself — avoiding blame and preserving his fragile ego, protecting a wildly distorted self-image as a “stable genius” — by constructing false narratives and shifting responsibility.
Can you think of an instance when Trump accepted responsibility for anything — other than taking the credit for other people’s accomplishments? Were he elected, Trump would, with near certainty, lie and scapegoat his way through our next crisis, likely of his making, to massive but preventable death, destruction, and human suffering.
We live in an extremely dangerous world. As I revisited W.J Hennigan’s March 7, 2024 Opinion in The New York Times, titled SOLE AUTHORITY, and made my way through the horrifyingly dark but illuminating pages of Annie Jacobsen’s recently published book Nuclear War, A Scenario, I could not help but think of the absolute necessity that American voters elect a rational, competent leader who places the lives and interests of the country’s citizens and humanity above all else.
In SOLE AUTHORITY, Hennigan explains:
“In the United States, it’s up to one person to decide whether the world becomes engulfed in nuclear war. Only the president has the authority to launch any of the roughly 3,700 nuclear weapons in the American stockpile, an arsenal capable of destroying all human life many times over. And that authority is absolute: No other person in the U.S. government serves as a check or balance once he or she decides to go nuclear. There is no requirement to consult Congress, to run the idea by the defense secretary or to ask the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his or her opinion.
“That means the American president is charged with the physical safety not only of some 334 million Americans but also of millions of people in other countries who, out of necessity, must rely upon his or her prudence and steady nerves to make a decision that could alter the course of human history.”
In her book Nuclear War, A Scenario, published March 26, 2024, Jacobsen describes in alarming detail what happens from the moment U.S. satellites detect the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile against the United States. Nuclear War isn’t about the U.S. president. As Hennigan and Jacobsen both explain, however, it is the president as commander-in-chief who has the sole authority to authorize use of the country’s nuclear weapons.
Jacobson constructs a scenario where North Korea launches a nuclear first strike on the United States, taking the reader through second-by-second and minute-by-minute sequences of events over a 72 minute period. Within the context of the scenario, Jacobsen discusses nuclear deterrence, parity, mutually assured destruction, and other constructs designed to prevent rational thinkers from using nuclear weapons. In his New York Times Review of Nuclear War, Barry Gewen highlights the possibility of humans with the best of intentions making misjudgments and errors in the “fog of war.”
In addition to Trump’s wildly erratic and irrational behavior on the campaign trail and demonstrably declining cognition and acuity in real time, we have an example from recent history of Trump’s inability to think and behave rationally in the interests of the United States and its citizens during crisis. The United States has just 4% of the world’s population but experienced 16% of the world’s deaths from Covid. As Mona Charen of Chicago Sun Times said: “A serious country would look back at Trump’s greatest challenge during his presidency and remember what an embarrassing failure it was.”
Remember this?
“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light. … And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. … I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. … And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.”
Earlier this year, Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine:
“‘ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?’ demands Donald Trump in one of his recent social-media posts. Well, funny he should ask.
“Four years ago, we were at the beginning of a horrendous pandemic that Trump was brutally mismanaging. Precisely four years ago, Trump was in the midst of a rapid pivot from insisting the pandemic was totally under control to insisting it was a dire threat caused by China. He would eventually toggle back and forth between denial and outrage, and also between lavishly praising China’s pandemic response and insinuating the country had deliberately spread the virus. At all times, his entire focus was on avoiding political blame, with extremely short time horizons and almost no concern for long-term outcomes.”
Republicans Haven’t Learned From Trump’s COVID Failures.
Mona Charen of Chicago Sun Times gives us a good timeline reminder of Trump’s utter incompetence as a leader in crisis:
“It began with denial. Trump told Bob Woodward in a February 2020 phone call that ‘You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. . . . This is deadly stuff.’
“But in his public statements, Trump repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the virus. On Jan. 22, 2020, he said, ‘We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.’ On Feb. 7, he tweeted: ‘Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.’
“On Feb. 10, he again reported on a chat with Xi, reassuring Americans that ‘I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control.’
“On Feb. 26, he urged people to wash their hands (fair enough) but then suggested that the new virus was ‘the same as the flu’ — exactly the opposite of what he told Woodward.
“On Feb. 27, he predicted that COVID would ‘disappear . . . it’s like a miracle.’
“On Feb. 28, Trump said the Democrats were politicizing the coronavirus, calling it their ‘new hoax.’
“Trump’s principal actions as chief executive in the early days of the pandemic were to enact travel bans from China and later Europe. He did nothing to initiate a testing program, and asserted falsely that anyone who wanted a test could get one.
“In March, Trump urged that a cruise ship, with sick passengers aboard, not be permitted to dock in San Francisco because he didn’t want to increase the number of cases counted in the United States. ‘I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.’
“Also in March 2020, citing a small French study, Trump declared that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, taken with an antibiotic, could be ‘one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine’ and should ‘be put in use immediately.’
“On April 3, Trump mentioned that the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention was now recommending that people wear masks but said that he would not wear one.
“By July, with the number of cases rising sharply, Trump suggested that tests were picking up trivial cases. By that point, 3.7 million Americans had been infected and more than 140,000 had died.
“Also in July, Trump elevated Dr. Stella Immanuel on Twitter. Immanuel touted hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID and denied that masks were effective. She also believed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.
“In a September 2020 campaign stop, Trump said that COVID affects ‘virtually nobody,’ mainly just ‘elderly people, elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects, that’s it.’
“Trump modeled contempt for masking, mocking reporters and others for wearing them. He held huge rallies and White House indoor parties that became superspreader events. When he himself became infected with COVID, he failed to disclose it to associates like Chris Christie (who wound up in intensive care) and arguably attempted to infect Joe Biden at the first presidential debate.
“Trump denied the problem, failed to coordinate a federal response other than banning travel, embraced quack cures and modeled antisocial behavior. After first praising Xi Jinping to the skies for his ‘strong’ control of the virus, he switched to name-calling — the ‘Kung Flu,’ the ‘China virus’ — to incite xenophobic responses. He really did only one big thing right — backing Operation Warp Speed, which hastened development of the vaccine.
“Now his party has gone full nutcase, demonizing Anthony Fauci. These are unserious people in thrall to a sociopathic clown. The U.S. death rate from COVID far exceeded that of peer nations. That was not due to excessive lockdowns or masking. It was due to incompetence in the White House. Time for a great remembering.”
Don’t forget how Trump mishandled the pandemic
During the middle of the Covid crisis four years ago, I posted Imagining Mr. Trump as a True Leader in Our Next Crisis is Impossible. There I said Trump was too stupid to anticipate simple cause and effect — what a pandemic could do to what he cared most about, next only to his image, his ace-in-the-hole for re-election: a thriving economy, yes, the one President Obama saved and delivered to him after the last Republican president nearly destroyed it. Arriving 70-days late to a ravaging crisis and having been easily outsmarted by a glob of genetic material that doesn’t have a brain but has only one purpose — survival — Trump blundered into his post-hoc singular strategy for his own survival — to take no ownership or responsibility for managing the crisis he wasn’t smart enough to contain, to announce that the federal government is “backup” to the states with no primary role in crisis or emergency management, to shift responsibility to and blame others while watching the destruction with an eye toward personal profiteering.
This, despite the powers of the presidency and the tools delivered by Congress to the executive in times of “national emergency — two very big words,” according to Mr. Trump — when states lacked the capacity and resources to meet the challenges. No one could have foreseen the Covid crisis or its devastation, according to Mr. Trump after claiming he knew it would become a pandemic before anyone else even knew what the word meant. He then blamed blue states for being unprepared and bestowed substantial emergency medical supplies and personal protection equipment on red and swing states.
Let’s not repeat Trump’s near perfect failure at virtually every level of leadership, governance, competence, and stewardship.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.