The United States is the world’s superpower and thus I have watched its response to the coronavirus crisis with some intrigue. Given my observations, and the realities of America’s response to the coronavirus crisis, I have concluded that the United States is a sick superpower. America sickness is evidenced by: Trump being Trump; politicians acting despicably; The Democratic party failing to rise to the occasion; and the media’s abysmal coverage of the coronavirus crisis. Moreover, “Big Government” and the negative consequences that flow from it proves America’s sickness. Because America is sick it has failed to rise to the occasion and adequately respond to the coronavirus crisis and it will struggle to recover from the crisis.
And, before you come at me for not going after the Republican party just remember that is the party that allowed Trump to hijack it and it is also a party that has Trump sycophants, members of the cult of the orange man, who reflexively defend whatever nonsense Trump is selling – that says a lot about the Republican party)
Trump being Trump and politicians acting despicably
Trump is the “chaos president” – just look at any of his daily briefings on coronavirus for proof. Trump has failed to responsibly respond to the coronavirus crisis.
First, Trump initially downplayed the crisis: “On February 10, President Trump made this prediction about the coronavirus at a rally: ‘It miraculously goes away.’ His contention was that April’s warmer weather would end the epidemic. On February 26, President Trump described the coronavirus situation this way: ‘You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.’” The “very stable genius” would later backtrack: “On March 17, he said: “I have always known this is a real pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Is it any wonder then why only 37% of Americans trust Trump for medical information about the coronavirus outbreak.
Second, Trump has at times treated the coronavirus as merely an economic challenge. Trump “spent the early days of the [coronavirus] crisis treating it as though it were principally an economic challenge and spent his time trying to ‘tweet the markets back to life.’” Trump is worried about the economy because he wanted to coast to reelection on the back of a strong economy. The coronavirus crisis handicaps that plan. This is not mere speculation as evidenced by the fact that the Trump administration asked the states to muck up their unemployment-claims reports in order to avoid spooking the markets.
Lastly, when it became apparent that the current crisis is indeed a pandemic and not merely an economic crisis, and his own handling of the coronavirus was lackluster, Trump attempted to shift the focus to Obama, and also to Biden (Trump’s principal opponent in the upcoming November election). As Kent Sepkowitz writes in Slate, Trump in defense of his response to coronavirus attempted to shift focus onto Obama and the Obama administration’s handling of the H1N1 virus. Accordingly, Trump asserted: that despite millions of cases and thousands of deaths, the Obama administration didn’t do anything about H1N1; Obama’s response to H1N1 “was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now”; and “The USA was never set up for this, just look at the catastrophe of the H1N1 Swine Flu (Biden in charge, 17,000 people lost, very late response time).” It is this attitude that led Trump to say “I don’t take responsibility at all” when he was asked about the lack of access to coronavirus. Obama is no longer president and H1N1 is not the virus currently ravaging the world – the buck stops with Trump.
Wouldn’t it be nice if in times of crisis politicians were not so naked about their own interests? Wouldn’t it be splendid if politicians just put their heads down, did their jobs, and when they mess up own up to their failure? The American president has not lived up to that expectation.
As Trump was failing, senators were cashing in: In one instance, “while Senator Richard Burr (R., N.C.) was offering a relatively rosy account of the coronavirus threat in public, he was taking a much more alarmed – and realistic – view of the threat in a private audience with a businessmen’s association. Senator Burr sold as much as $1.7m in shares in 33 transactions on February 13. Burr, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, says that he based this decision on ‘publicly available sources,’ especially CNBC’s Asia bureaus.” In another instance, Senator Kelly Loeffler (R., GA) and her husband, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, “unloaded millions of dollars in stock over a couple of weeks – beginning on the day she received a coronavirus briefing.” What these Senators did is utterly despicable and has only reinforced my belief that I cannot trust politicians to handle crises responsibly – the observation “that people are so vulnerable to conspiracy theories and to misinformation…because they believe that they are being lied to by those with whom they have entrusted great power, that the truth is being kept from them by design” is a correct one.
The Democratic Party failing to rise to the occasion
The Democratic Party (the majority party in the House of Representatives and the minority party in the Senate) has failed to rise to the challenges posed by the coronavirus crisis.
On March 22, 2020, Senate Democrats filibustered a bill designed to provide immediate relief to American workers and businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Democrats demanded that a relief package should include: A bail out on all current debt at the Postal Service; required early voting; required same day voter registration; provisions on official time for union collective bargaining; full offset of airline emissions by 2025; publication and reporting of greenhouse gas statistics for individual flights; retirement plans for community newspaper employees; federal $15 minimum wage; permanent paid leave; and study on climate change mitigation efforts. The Democratic party saw it necessary to play “hardball” and “politicise” the present crisis. The Democratic party was merely heeding the advice of Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s former chief-of-staff, to never let a crisis go to waste – the present crisis presented “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit [their] vision.”
Republican law makers were rightly incensed by Democratic demands: Senator Ted Cruz asked: What the hell do these provisions have to do with Coronavirus? Senator Ben Sasse, in a press release, wrote: “Instead of taking that legislation – urgent, necessary legislation — and passing it quickly, Democrats have now decided to allow Speaker Pelosi to block it through proxies here in the Senate so that she can rewrite the bill with a ton of crap that has absolutely nothing to do with the public health emergency that we face at this moment.” And, Senator Tom Cotton said: “There is a good bill, a bill that was negotiated in good faith over the weekend with many Democrats… that they are now blocking, that they will not even start debate on because of ideological wish-list items…It is disgraceful, and it is dangerous to the lives of our people and their economic well-being…Democrats want to impose quotas for race and sex on corporate boards…Is that going to stop anyone from getting sick from coronavirus?…This report is correct. Pelosi & Schumer are willing to risk your life, your job, your retirement savings for a radical, left-wing wish list that has nothing to do with this virus. Disgraceful[.]”
Republican outrage should not be understated – truth is the Congressional Democrats have not risen to the occasion: Democrats saw an opportunity to advance political goals that are in no way related to the coronavirus crisis. By trying to push through their pet ideological projects, in coronavirus legislation, Democrats were cynically playing political games. There is a time for ordinary politics and the inertia that comes from it – in fact, the Madisonian constitutional architecture lends itself to inertia – however, in times of crisis, like the present moment, some political games are utterly reprehensible.
Abysmal media coverage
Just like the Democratic party, the media has failed to rise to the occasion. Initially, the media downplayed the impacts of the virus and botched its coverage.
On January 23, “authorities in Beijing sealed off Wuhan, a city of 11 million in China’s interior, to contain the virus. Much of the media response was to downplay this harbinger of the deadly global threat to come.” On January 29, BuzzFeed warned the public not to worry about the coronavirus but instead worry about the flu. On January 31, Vox told its readers “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.”On February 1, “the Washington Post ran an article headlined, ‘Get a [grip], America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now.’” By February 3, “China had extended the quarantine to 50 million people and imposed a travel ban on 16 cities. Now, the Washington Post was worried, but about government’s response, not the virus, writing a critical story with the headline ‘Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus.’ The complaint was that harsh measures ‘scapegoat already marginalized populations’ and that the Trump administration’s travel ban on noncitizens coming from China ‘marks a significant, and potentially counterproductive, escalation in the U.S. response to the coronavirus crisis.’” On February 7, The Daily Beast “was saying, ‘Coronavirus, with zero American fatalities, is dominating headlines, while the flu is the real threat.’” “As late as March 4, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was telling viewers, ‘So if you’re freaked out at all about the coronavirus, you should be more concerned about the flu.’”
To add to the list of terrible media coverage, the media did spend time to remind us that Trump is racist because he referred to Coronavirus as “Chinese virus.” This is the same media that used the term “Chinese Coronavirus.” A more serious media would not have paid lip service to Trumps terminology either out of fear of being labelled hypocrites or out of acknowledgement that it is not uncommon to name diseases after places and people. (Even, Bill Maher – who is by no means a Trump fan or right-wing guy – has said: We named other viruses after where they originated. why should china be an exception?)
The media’s horrible coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and its reflexive Trump bashing, has not gone unnoticed. As of March 25, 2020, Gallup found that 55percent of Americans disapproved of the news media’s handling of the Coronavirus crisis. In contrast, Americans approve of hospitals (88percent), Daycare (83percent), state government (82percent), employers (82percent), government health agencies (80percent), Vice President Pence (61pecent), Trump (60percent), Congress (59percent). So, of the 9 institutions polled only the new media is underwater. So, people do not trust the one institution that by their own standards see themselves as “gatekeepers” of information. The media is broken and sick and the people know this is true.
Big government
A pandemic is a time when people expect competent government and yet the United States government’s response to coronavirus has been a failure of historic proportions. “Big Government” has left the United States less prepared and less able to deal with the coronavirus crisis.
One government agency that proves that Big Government (and its features of caution, red tape, and regulatory roadblocks) is not helpful is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which has for decades been plagued by bad policy: “The agency’s emphasis on caution over speed led to needless suffering and loss of life long before the [coronavirus] pandemic… The delay in [coronavirus testing] in the United States meant that for weeks doctors and public officials were flying blind about who was infected and where major outbreaks were located. This means that they had little hope of containing the virus before it started spreading out of control.”
In short, bad policy has insured the United States has had insufficient testing capacity. “As of March 17, the U.S. had tested only about 125 people per million. South Korea had tested more than 5,000 people per million. Between early February and mid-March, the U.S. lost six crucial weeks because regulators stuck to rigid regulations instead of adapting as new information came in. While these rules might have made sense in normal times, they proved disastrous in a pandemic.” Moreover, “There have been three major regulatory barriers so far to scaling up testing by public labs and private companies: 1) obtaining an Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA); 2) being certified to perform high-complexity testing consistent with requirements under Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA); and 3) complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule and the Common Rule related to the protection of human research subjects. On the demand side, narrow restrictions on who qualified for testing prevented the U.S. from adequately using what capacity it did have.” Given the aforementioned bureaucratic failures, it is worth remembering “that a government that gets too big and tries to do too much often ends up losing focus and failing to do those things it really should. For example, the Centers for Disease Control might have been better prepared for, say, controlling this disease, if it had spent less effort on studying child car seats, vaping, and guns.”
Another feature of Big Government is lack of fiscal discipline. The United States’ lack of fiscal discipline during good times has limited its ability to respond to the economic fallout from the Coronavirus crisis. “Even before the economy started to tank, the Trump administration had run up trillion-dollar deficits…Now, when additional government spending may be needed in the short term, the long-term consequences could be severe.” Fiscal sobriety should not be understated: “One of the reasons it would be preferable to be a low-debt and low-deficit country is that rather than talking about coronavirus response measures in the few millions here and there, [the United States] could instead commit to replacing a large share of lost wages for furloughed workers for a few weeks…[Moreover,] If the United States had been maintaining a sound fiscal policy up until this point…carrying…extra [trillions] in debt would be a relatively easy thing – as a one-time emergency measure.” However, deficit spending and racking up additional debt is a much trickier and riskier proposition given the lack of fiscal sobriety for which both Republican and Democrats are to blame. The conclusion is obvious: “If you live day in and day out on an emergency basis, it is difficult to deal with an actual emergency.”
If the United States had been on a stronger fiscal footing it would have the flexibility to deal with this crisis. According to initial estimates unemployment was projected to hit as high as 20% and that would have cost 5 million jobs. However, as the crisis has progressed, the St. Louis Fed projects Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, and the unemployment rate may hit 32%. The United States would have been able better to respond had it not been $22trn in the hole. Lack of fiscal discipline has left the United States less prepared and less able to deal with the coronavirus crisis – trillions cannot be easily appropriated to help Americans deal with lost jobs as a result of mandatory closures. Similarly, when the crisis ends, the United States will struggle to recover and rebuild its economy as “more debt, more mandates on business, and more regulations will only make the recovery longer, slower, and harder.”
“Big Government” also has negative effects on the allocation of goods. For instance, price controls, in the guise of anti-price-gouging regulations, have led to hoarding and panic buying. At times of shortage (say, for hand sanitizer or toilet paper), we should want prices to rise in order to discourage overconsumption and to encourage increased production. For example, if the price of toilet paper rose, those who really needed it would still buy it, but others would be discouraged from ‘stocking up, just in case.’ The empty shelves we are seeing are, in part, due to well-intentioned but economically deficient regulations.”
In conclusion, “Big Government” and the negative consequences that flow from it proves America’s sickness. America’s sickness is also evidenced by: Trump being Trump; politicians acting despicably; The Democratic party failing to rise to the occasion; and the media’s abysmal coverage of the coronavirus crisis. Because America is sick it has failed to rise to the occasion and adequately respond to the coronavirus crisis and it will struggle to recover from the crisis.
(The lessons Africa can learn from the United States will follow later in the series).
The views expressed in part two of this article are Nkosi Mfumu’s own opinions and not necessarily those of Business Tech Africa.
About the author: Zambia-based lawyer (licensed to practice in the State of Illinois) holds a BA in International Studies (with a concentration in International Relations) and is also a Juris Doctor.
