Reality Arrives to the Trump Era By Andrew Sullivan

NY Mag
INTERESTING TIMES MAR. 13, 2020
Reality Arrives to the Trump Era
By Andrew Sullivan

... President Trump is not the only complacent figure. In Britain and Germany, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Angela Merkel have all but resigned themselves to an inevitable culling of the population, and have imposed few draconian measures by fiat. Only yesterday, Johnson was unwilling to shut down soccer matches — before the soccer authorities decided to do it on their own.

...With Trump, we have a deeper crisis, of course. Trump is incapable of admitting error, numb to any form of empathy, narcissistic even in a communal crisis, and immune to any kind of realism. He simply cannot tell anyone bad news. And he cannot keep a story straight, which is essential for public health. His only means of communication is deceptive salesmanship. He defunded the federal body designed to tackle such emergencies, and his Cabinet is packed with incompetence, corruption, and fealty. He cannot summon trust among at least half the country, and he has willfully destroyed confidence in the public institutions we desperately need to get through this.

...He is in charge of public health but can still blithely say something completely untrue — like everyone coming into the U.S. is being tested, or that anyone who wants a coronavirus test can get one, to give two damning examples. Rather than concede a failure, Trump will always lie. He is utterly unfit to be president, and always has been. We had a chance to remove him from office before a catastrophe struck, but the Senate kept him in power. This is their responsibility too.

Trump is singularly incapable of addressing this credibly or effectively, with anything like the right mix of realism and hope the crisis demands...He is immune to data, resistant to any facts that might suggest his own administration’s failure, and his prime-time address was deeply unsettling and off-kilter. We have been so, so lucky to have avoided a major crisis for the last three years, but our luck has now run out...But this is now as real as it gets. And it is just the beginning.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/andrew-sullivan-reality-arrives-to-the-trump-era.html