COVID: Clueless but narcissistic chaos isn't leadership

The Washington Post has run an informative investigative piece based on a large number of interviews with the parties involved called "34 days of pandemic: Inside Trump's desperate attempts to reopen America." It's a portrait of an administration that is spinning its wheels, changing directions with every change in the President's mood, grasping at straws and looking for magic bullets that might quickly resolve the crisis (and, incidentally, get the President re-elected), and in general making a great deal of noise without getting much done.

In other words, pretty much what one would imagine a Trump administration would look like in a moment of crisis. And it isn't a pretty picture.

Lots of testing capacity, but little testing actually being done- because the necessary materials aren't available and the President can't get his act together to render Federal help where it's needed. Necessary materials withheld from states whose governors are deemed insufficiently loud in their praise of The Leader. "Miracle" cures with little hope of working hyped as our salvation, only to have them quickly shown to be failures. In short, an administration flailing desperately and running around in circles in the midst of one of the greatest national crises in our history.

This is why you don't elect a conspiracy theorist and huckster whose one talent is self-promotion as President. When all is said and done, and putting aside the crackpot aspects of his character, his self-absorption, his instinctive attempts to govern by dividing rather than uniting us and to find scapegoats rather than actual solutions to the nation's problems; ignoring his emotional immaturity, his lack of empathy, and his shortcomings as a manager (he never did that well as a manager in the business world, either; literally every company he ever headed went bankrupt), we are being confronted with the fundamental reality about Donald Trump: that while he claims to know more about everything than anybody, in fact, he knows practically nothing about anything- and least of all, what he's doing.