White House aides can produce a Kabuki dance for Trump to play president, but he lacks the authority or the preparation to pull this off. Meanwhile, Trump does not want to be blamed if his deadline backfires. The Post reports that the White House is scurrying about “trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives.”

Alas, his attempt to enlist businesses to demand the reopening is not bearing fruit. The New York Times reports: “When the first conference call of President Trump’s economic advisory council on reopening the economy was held Wednesday morning, several business executives echoed a cry that health officials and state and local leaders have been making for weeks, according to two participants: The country needs more testing.”

AD

AD

They are right. The basic problem with the White House deadline (other than the twisted sense of priorities) is that to restart the economy to any significant degree, we will need to conduct covid-19 testing on a massive scale. Without the federal government, the states cannot do it. And the federal government seems not to be doing anything about the testing gap.

A group of top Senate Democrats on Wednesday released a report showing how the United States “lags the world” in testing and leads the world in the number of coronavirus cases. “The fastest way to be safe at home — and safe away from home — is to know your test status,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on a conference call unveiling the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee’s report.

Schumer proposes a full-scale effort by the federal government to ramp up testing. As part of a three-stage plan, Democrats want to initially spend more than $6 billion for such purposes as funding state testing programs, developing testing and treatment at the National Institutes of Health and supporting "research, development and review of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics to help protect the health and safety of the American people.”

AD

AD

This plan will likely engender the support of governors of some of the worst-hit states that simply do not have the funds and cannot find private-sector capacity to perform all the needed tests, let alone the contact tracing that must follow. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) stressed this over and over again at his Wednesday news conference. “We cannot do it without federal support and I’ve been saying this for days. . . . When you have a state that has to do a large number of these tests, I’m telling you, we can’t do it without federal support and I’ve said that to day one.”

Cuomo aptly analogized to the ventilator problem. Because the federal government is essentially AWOL, states are left to compete with one another for scarce testing materials and capacity. Trump is not doing his job, and as a result, the testing needed to restart the economy is lacking.

Even Republicans may have figured this out. According to CBS News’s Major Garrett, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said on Wednesday: “Without more tests with quick results, it will be difficult to contain this disease and give Americans confidence to go back to work and back to school. Nothing is more important.” Alexander added, “Nothing is more important than finding a new diagnostic technology that will make it possible to test tens of millions of Americans, something our country has never tried to do before.” He wants to spend tens of billions of dollars for a federal effort.

Trump’s incompetence prevents him from helping the states climb out of the ditch. His ego insists he gets all the credit and none of the blame. The result is a continued economic and health crisis made worse by an unfit president.