BTRTN: Pandemic's Box: Trump Drifts Towards Irrelevance

Born To Run The Numbers provides its review of the month of April, in which Donald Trump's inability to rise to the American people's expectations of our Presidents in times of crisis became woefully apparent:

http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2020/05/btrtn-pandemics-box-trump-drifts.html

Excerpts: "As of March 31, there were roughly 212,000 total cases of coronavirus in the United States, and the death toll had just edged over 5,000. Now, one month later, we have passed the one million mark in cases, and the death toll has ballooned harrowingly to over 60,000 – more than was lost in Vietnam in our two-decade struggle there -- and still climbing fast...
"Where was Donald Trump in all of this? Seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Quickly recognizing the ratings bonanza of the daily Task Force briefings, Trump commandeered them with a daily assault on anyone’s sense of leadership under duress...
"The net effect of all of this – the utter lack of leadership Trump has brought to the crisis, the disdain of science, the irresponsible statements, the refusal to use the power of the federal government to commandeer procurement of needed supplies or allocate scarce materials, and the deferral of all decision making to governors – has strangely rendered Trump more or less irrelevant in the management of this crisis, stuck in a pandemic's box of his own making. It is a stunning turn of events that has no ready analogy, except, perhaps, the inaction of James Buchanan before the Civil War or Herbert Hoover in the early years of the Depression...
"One thing is clear: the US has failed to bring down the number of new cases as well as other large countries. A comparison of the US to the combined totals of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK – a total population about equal to that if the US – bears this out...
"There is no longer any rational debate about whether Trump has handled the crisis well. Even a healthy subset of the GOP – in polling -- thinks he was too slow off the mark is reacting to the threat of the virus and is not a credible source of information..."