Where’s Our CEO President?
While Donald Trump’s time in the White House has been an endless supply of quips and quotes, the Covid-19 pandemic disaster has given pundits and historians the catch phrase that will define his presidency: “I don’t take responsibility at all.” That was the President’s defensive answer to questions about his dissolution of the pandemic response team and the subsequent testing boondoggle that has prevented states and communities from identifying, isolating, and tracking the community spread of the most insidious villain the country has faced in a century. Widespread testing is the obvious first line of defense against a communicable disease threat, and one that other nations like South Korea, Taiwan, and Germany have seamlessly implemented. It’s also one Italy and Spain miserably failed, and from whom the White House and CDC could have learned. Oh, how far we’ve fallen from the days and iconic words of one of the nation’s strongest leaders, Harry S Truman and the sign on his desk: “The buck stops here.”
A national crisis is when the country needs the President most, and it should be the time when a leader rises to the occasion, a time when he sets a course, takes command, and steers the nation through the storm. It should not be at time when, as Thomas Paine said of the sunshine patriot, a shallow and vain personality “will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.” A national crisis like a pandemic is the precise moment a country needs a business management expert, a real CEO, in the White House. For truly, this national emergency has hit business areas the hardest with disruptions and stagnation in supply and distribution lines, as the nation struggles to implement testing and to guarantee that medical personnel on the front lines have access to all the materials, including indispensable PPE, they need. These are the products states are now competing with each other to secure, an issue that is stymieing and stifling the pace with which the nation can meet and defeat the threat. The stay-at-home orders which have devastated local economies are the collateral damage of a mismanaged health crisis.
It’s been disheartening, and actually quite scary, to watch the President struggle to define and implement a strategy, as the healthcare system bends and strains and the economy and financial condition of families struggle for oxygen like the people in ICU. Most troubling is that the President is correct in his concerns that the United States cannot just close down indefinitely; yet he continues to waffle in his leadership. While he hoped “to have the country opened up” by Easter, he had no plan for how that could be done safely. The daily press charades have been about wishes and desires, but that’s not all a CEO should have. A successful CEO or executive or manager develops a business plan and implements it. But as Jake Tapper so bluntly exposed in his commentary last week, there is no plan. The President has the power, the support, the resources, and the opportunity to lead. He has the full weight of the federal government from the Treasury to the NSA. And to be perfectly honest, he has the plan. It’s called the Defense Production Act through which the White House could organize, plan, and direct a national intervention to test, identify, quarantine, track, and contain the virus. After that, people could return to work, and some normalcy could resume.
The crisis needs a coordinated business response, the likes of which happened in places such as Taiwan that implemented the 143-point plan it developed following the last SARS crisis. This crisis and the nation needs a true CEO — oh, how the GOP should lament ignoring Mitt Romney. And, granted, there have been many missteps leading to the President’s fumbling response. The lack of experienced leaders in the West Wing and the stripped down CDC have hurt us. It’s worth noting how Dr. Fauci has been seriously wrong and inconsistent in the run up to the explosion of cases, telling the nation and the President in early February that risk to the United States was minuscule. Sadly, the risk could have been small had the White House Leadership been wise and experienced enough to coordinate Fauci’s guess with contrary warnings in reports from the intelligence community, the military, and the obvious non-stop coverage by the world media.
It didn’t have to be this way. But it is, and at some point, the nation must know what went wrong. That’ll be a question for the Covid-19 Commission in 2021, the first act of hopefully a new Congress and a new administration.
