Christopher Pyne: Donald Trump has failed his people in his response to the COVID-19 crisis
US President Donald Trump reacted early in the crisis as though he was dealing with a political campaign. With 20,000 now dead, he has failed the American people, writes Christopher Pyne.
Opinion
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I’ve not been one of the crowd that chases the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, with clubs, pitchforks and burning embers after some of his seemingly more unorthodox statements or policy decisions.
Trump’s very quirkiness is one of his attractions to his American voter base. He promised to “drain the swamp”. He ran against Washington DC. He is the anti-politician (who has been running for office for decades by the way).
He has deliberately honed his style and in the age of social media, he was able to go around the mainstream press, into the handheld devices, lap tops and desktop computers of the American voter and deliver his message directly to them. It is infuriating to the political establishment of either Democrat or Republican persuasion.
There may never be another Trump – how do you repeat his performance? But for at least the next year and possibly another four after that, he is the leader of the free world.
Whatever anyone might predict about the future, America remains the largest economy in the world – it’s agile, entrepreneurial and free. It is independent minded. Whatever Trump’s faults, and there appear to be many, both personal and political, the world needs him and through him, the United States, to be strong and successful.
So, while many others have scoffed at Trump and denigrated him for his lack of sophistication, I have remained a non partisan. Sometimes, I have even commented semi-favourably on his ability to wrong foot and defeat his opponents.
His chutzpah, as a political weapon, is so confounding for the orthodox politicians he has faced that it makes their efforts to defeat him seem almost pathetic.
Who could forget Jeb Bush, the former Governor of Florida, the son and brother of two presidents, cashed up, electorally successful, from a state the Republicans need to win to win the Presidency, vainly trying to fight off the Trump insurgency during the Republican primaries in 2016 and simply not possessing the equipment to do so? I felt sorry for him. He was crushed.
But for all that confidence, Trump has failed his people in his response to the COVID-19 crisis.
His trademark bravado may confuse and unsettle those leaders of other nations that he communicates with via broadcast – Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, the Iranian Ayatollahs, Nicolas Maduro, Recep Tayyip Erdogan among others – but he has been found wanting as an effective leader in a pandemic.
Like many, I don’t believe the numbers of infected and dead as a result of COVID-19 being reported by nations like China, Iran and others. China appears to have simply stopped reporting new cases as the number has been almost static for weeks. We are also yet to see the true impact of COVID-19 on countries with large populations and basic health care across Africa, South America, parts of Asia, parts of the Middle East and the sub continent.
We may never know how many COVID-19 killed in a place like Brazil, India or Indonesia, where there are huge numbers of people living cheek by jowl and limited options for healthcare.
But in terms of the numbers that are likely to be true – those for the United States are horrific.
John Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Centre’s latest figures as of April 11 show the number of Americans infected has now reached over half a million. Deaths in New York alone are 7887 and its near neighbour New Jersey has lost 1932. Many more will die.
Trump appears to have reacted early in the crisis as though he was dealing with a political campaign. He sheeted home blame to China’s mishandling of the crisis from late 2019 (fairly). He claimed in January to have the virus beaten in the United States because of his early action in stopping travel from China to the US.
As COVID-19 spread across the US and it was very obvious that unprecedented measures would be needed to “flatten the curve”, Trump argued with state and local leaders about who bore responsibility for the needed response and appeared to trade barbs with other politicians.
It wasn’t long ago he stated that by Easter Sunday, the churches would be full and the country would be largely back to normal. Trump said that he didn’t want the “cure to be worse than the disease”, in other words that the reaction be such that it smashed the US economy for the foreseeable future.
This poor response sent a message to the people of the United States that their government wasn’t as concerned about the health impacts of the virus as they were about shutting down the US economy. It bred complacency that saw US citizens going about their daily lives as though there was no crisis – hadn’t their President said that the flu killed more people every year than the coronavirus was going to?
Trump is many things. But in a fight where the enemy is something as mysterious and hard to dismiss with bite-sized sound grabs for the news media, Trump has been found seriously wanting.
Contrast his approach with the very clear-eyed and decisive action taken by the national Cabinet here in Australia.
The Prime Minster, premiers and chief ministers and their chief medical officers, have largely sung from the same song sheet. There hasn’t been political point scoring between the two levels of government. There has been problem solving. We have all been given a very clear message – stay home, practice social distancing, care for one another. The Australian people have responded well. While it is early days, the news about whether these measures have impacted on the spread of the virus, is positive.
Trump is understood to have told people visiting him in the White House that his response to COVID-19 will determine his chances for re-election.
If that is the case, he has a lot of work to do to convince American voters he deserves another term come November.