Trump has ‘drained the swamp’; now he has blood on his hands

A recent Boston Globe editorial charged that President Donald Trump had “blood on his hands”.

The paper, one of America’s most influential news outlets, argued that Mr Trump’s narcissism, incompetence, callousness, and “colossal failure of leadership” had caused an unthinkably staggering number of American deaths from the coronavirus.

This is the puzzle: how did the United States, the wealthiest and most medically advanced nation on earth, fail so spectacularly to stop a pandemic which it had ample time to contain?

How did the US, whose educational and scientific institutions are second to none, totally fail to protect its people from a predictable enemy? Look no further than the White House. That’s your one and only answer.

As Kenyans know only too well, choices in elections have consequences, as they were warned by US Ambassador Johnnie Carson in 2013.

That’s true for every country with an open electoral system, including the US. In 2016, as the sun set on President Barack Obama’s tenure at the White House, Americans faced a choice that should’ve been a no-brainer.

Either elect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democrat and arguably the most qualified presidential candidate in American history, or go with Trump, the Republican nincompoop and bumbling sexual predator.

RACIST TROPE

Trump was a neophyte who knew nothing about government. Even worse, he was a bully with the attention span of a two-year-old.

But he knew how to uncork America’s original sin. He based his campaign on a racist trope to “Make America Great Again”.

That’s code for restoring an unapologetic white supremacy. To do so, he promised to undo every law, institution, project, or programme based on social justice, anti-discrimination, or equal protection.

He told racist white people — of which there are very many — that it was OK to be openly racist and misogynistic. He declared that it was open season on African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims.

He was caught on tape bragging that it was self-gratifying and desirable to forcibly grab women by their private parts. I had never seen anything like it in my nearly 40 years in America.

But Americans chose Trump over Mrs Clinton. Mr Trump’s devoted constituency — white evangelicals, white, blue-collar workers, and, most shockingly, white women — swept him into office.

It’s not difficult to imagine that most of them voted against Mrs Clinton and for Trump as a repudiation of Mr Obama, America’s first African-American chief executive.

DEEP STATE

They couldn’t get over the thought of Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama sleeping in Lincoln’s bedroom in the White House.

To date, most in this peanut gallery have stuck with Trump even in the face of his embarrassing incompetence. But you reap what you sow. They sowed the wind and are reaping the whirlwind.

Once Trump got into office, he took a machete to what he called the Deep State. This is the bureaucracy that’s been the backbone of the most powerful nation in world history.

America wouldn’t sit atop the world but for its civil and public service. This includes all sectors of the state — Executive, Judiciary, Congress, intelligence, and the regulatory state.

Trump quickly started to weaken them by appointing servile loyalists and utter incompetents. He disembowelled large chunks of the administrative state. There’s virtually no one at the top left to speak truth to power. American democracy is seriously endangered.

On the coronavirus, Trump disbanded the office in the National Security Council whose remit was pandemics. He was singularly obsessed with the stock market and his re-election.

Apart from packing the courts with right-wing loonies — and tweeting about political “enemies” — Trump has been asleep at the switch.

LATE RESPONSE

That’s why when Covid-19 broke in Wuhan, China, Trump didn’t listen to his advisers in January. One of them, trade adviser Peter Navarro, an extremist on China, even predicted very early that the virus could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and incinerate trillions in dollars in the economy.

His grovelling Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar was afraid to boldly tell him of the deadly threat of Covid-19.

It was too late by the time Trump was forced to respond to the virus. He had refused to enforce mitigation measures — social distancing, closing schools, testing, issuing lockdowns — early enough to stop the spread.

Travel bans from hotspots like China and Europe were porous, or too late. The country didn’t have adequate supplies and inventory of protective gear, and the supply of ventilators was woefully low.

Trump refused to invoke the Defence Production Act early enough to force private companies to produce the equipment. He failed to lead.

It doesn’t matter whether you have the most advanced and sophisticated aircraft in the world; an incompetent pilot will crash it.

Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School and Chair of KHRC. @makaumutua.