The evil-or-bungling question is rarely this easily solved. The president*, as we know, is putting together groups of croni...er...business executives to “re-open” the country. (How he’s going to get people to go out and mingle is another question entirely.) The problem seems to be that several of the croni...er...business executives didn’t know they were on the team. From the Washington Post:



But across the business world, there was private unhappiness with how the White House handled the announcement of the advisory council — which it has dubbed its “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups” — and others warned that Trump’s goal of a May 1 reopening date for much of the country was unrealistic. Many of the chief executives urged the White House to focus more on mass testing, according to several participants on the calls. Public health experts have argued that widespread testing is a key prerequisite to reopening the economy because it would determine who is infected and needs to be isolated, giving Americans greater confidence that they can safely return to work and public life.



One processing plant lit up South Dakota. Smithfield Foods has the marketing problem to end all marketing problems. No CEO wants to preside over the next Smithfield Foods. And if El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has his way, there will be Smithfield Foods all over America. Many of the country’s CEOs are vultures, but they’re smart vultures. And they don’t like to be blindsided.



“We got a note about a conference call, like you’d get an invite to a Zoom thing, a few lines in an email, and that was it. Then our CEO heard his name in the Rose Garden? What the [expletive]?” said one prominent Washington lobbyist for a leading global corporation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. “My company is furious. How do you go from ‘Join us on a call’ to, ‘Well, you’re on our team?’”...participants in the calls — which took place in four rounds and included representatives from more than a dozen industries, including banking, sports, agriculture and health care — painted a picture of a chaotic approach by the White House.



These people are not landscapers from Atlantic City. They are CEOs of massive companies, and they're not glorified branding concerns. They are not going to fall for the grift. They can see it coming: the president* is going to make a dangerous mistake, and he’s going to do it in the worst possible fashion. As for the rest of us, well, we’re in several worlds of shit.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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