Peter Wehner: The president is trapped

All of these people surely wish the president would act differently. But they also know they cannot change him. They have no time to spare, and they know what they must do—individually and collectively—to minimize the damage.

Donald Trump likes to portray himself and his administration as victims of some unknown and unprecedented invasion. Yet while this virus is new, crisis management is not. Ideally, America’s pandemic response would be coordinated by the federal government based on emergency plans, training efforts, and simulation exercises created in the aftermath of previous public-health crises, such as SARS, H1N1, and Ebola. The basic approach to managing a pandemic—recently validated by other countries that appear to have gotten past the peak of their coronavirus outbreak—is to identify and treat people who are infected, send a surge of resources to the hardest-hit places, and buy time for mitigation measures to bring down the infection rate. The relevant plans all envision a strong federal role in supporting state and local responses.

In a variety of ways, Trump has explicitly ignored this well-established national guidance. He continues to look for the easy exit—the nonexistent vaccine, the miracle treatment. His administration circulates fanciful numbers about the availability of tests. He abandons international cooperation because of his insistence that our allies call COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus.” He disdains scientists and seeks advice from A-Rod. He seeks vengeance against governors who do not praise him lavishly. Most of his supposed contributions are utter madness. On Saturday, the president tweeted bizarrely about imposing a quarantine in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Before he backed off later in the day, officials in those states wasted hours trying to figure out what on Earth he might have meant.

Fail-safes exist not to fix the underlying problem, but to limit losses. Amid all the disorganization and dysfunction, people are working purposefully to save lives. As Trump promised a quick treatment to solve our woes, a primary adviser—Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—immediately stepped in to quash the speculation and urge citizens to take shelter instead. As Trump floated an Easter deadline for the end of Americans’ isolation, governors extended social-distancing rules into May. “Yeah, no,” Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, said Friday. “We’re not going to be up and running by Easter. No.” (Yesterday, Trump finally gave up that pretense.)

As Trump pretends he is a war president—but only belatedly invokes the Defense Production Act to get a single company, GM, to manufacture a single commodity in the months to come—the leaders of companies such as 3M and China’s Alibaba work through the logistics of getting supplies to those who need them. As Trump says that the states need to take the lead during a national catastrophe that hurts them all, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the military quietly move medical assets to prepositioned areas, based on long-standing emergency-management principles that require no presidential authorization.