But in the United States, the pandemic has devolved into a kind of grotesque caricature of American federalism. The private sector has taken on quasi-state functions at a time when the executive branch of government—drained of scientific expertise, starved of moral vision—has taken on the qualities of a failed state. In a country where many individuals, companies, institutions, and local governments are making hard decisions for the good of the nation, the most important actor of them all—the Trump administration—has been a shambolic bonanza of incompetence.

It might seem hyperbolic to compare the U.S. government to a failed state that cannot project its authority or adequately ensure the safety of its population. But for much of the past month, the White House has shown an inability to do either.

The Trump administration has failed to perform the most basic function of a state during a pandemic—which is to accurately assess the threat. While South Korea is reportedly conducting 10,000 tests a day, lawmakers learned on Thursday that the U.S. has conducted only 11,000 coronavirus tests in total. (For the U.S. to catch up to South Korea on a per capita basis, it would need to conduct 65,000 tests daily.) But the coronavirus caught the Trump White House flat-footed. The administration fired the U.S. pandemic-response team in 2018. It ignored early warnings from epidemiologists; refused to waive regulations that impeded early testing; and botched its initial COVID-19 testing kits.

Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over

The White House has also failed in its basic role to protect the public by communicating accurate and useful information about public health and hygiene.

On February 24, Donald Trump tweeted that “the Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” even as cases were growing exponentially. The next day, he mocked the idea of an economic stimulus, tweeting that “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer is complaining, for publicity purposes only, that I should be asking for more money than $2.5 Billion to prepare for Coronavirus.” (Today, many economists are advocating a trillion-dollar economic stimulus.) On March 2, at a political rally, Trump said the coronavirus was no worse than the flu and promised that vaccines were coming “relatively soon,” even though most health experts don’t expect a widely distributed vaccine for at least another year.

This week, in the president’s only Oval Office remarks since the pandemic struck, Trump made so many mistakes that at least three separate policy announcements had to be corrected. Because he suggested (erroneously) that U.S. citizens abroad would soon be barred from reentry, he triggered an emergency gathering of Americans at European airports during a pandemic when crowd-gathering is known to spread the virus. Even some of Trump’s non-policy recommendations were quickly proven empty. Yesterday, two days after saying that “we must put politics aside [and] stop the partisanship,” he published a tweet blaming Barack Obama for kneecapping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s ability to respond to the pandemic. (Obama did no such thing.)