Flim-Flam, by Damn

Over the past few weeks I've written a lot about Trump's cover-up of his failure to take aggressive action on the coronavirus outbreak. He's lied repeatedly, first about the severity of the epidemic and then about his own leadership.

But there's a more fundamental, maybe more deadly, dimension of the scheme. Every day, Trump goes before the cameras and holds a pep rally. Real news organizations have learned these little dog and pony shows are both campaign rallies and misinformation sessions, so they cut away when Trump talks. But FoxNews viewers still think the media have overhyped the virus. Whatever.

The big news is how many times Trump has led us to believe he was doing something when actually he wasn't--and when he was doing something crooked.

Today we learned--only because the House Oversight Committee took testimony--that the 100,000 ventilators Trump had promised won't arrive until June at the earliest, per FEMA. What's especially informative about this: Trump has also claimed states need fewer ventilators than they're begging for--so is he really committed to this project?

Where the White House had promised 27 million tests by the end of March, just over a million have been delivered. On March 10 Pence promised more than 4 million tests by the end of that week. Still just over a million.

Yesterday Mike Pence was asked if the government might open Obamacare enrollment in the crisis. He went on and on, finally to say, "It's something we're looking at." Trump loved this.

I think that's one of the greatest answers I've ever heard because Mike was able to speak for five minutes and not even touch your question. I said that's what you call a great professional.

No honesty here.

You have to wonder: which is it? We'd all assumed the federal government was on point for a major crisis like that. Stung by criticisms of his response, Trump made big promises. But today? Trump tried an alternative move: states should be stockpiling supplies in case of events like this.

The states should have building their stockpiles ... we're a backup. We're not an ordering clerk.

This is TrumpSpeak. If you say A once, B five times, and opposite-A three times, you've covered your bases. You can't be accused of being wrong. You're never right, but you can always defend yourself.

I've mentioned this before, but remember when Trump promised that Google was working on making testing more accessible? Well, he didn't hire Google. He passed along the business to a Kushner-tied company, and they accomplished basically nothing.

So Trump's failure amounts to more than a slow start. His administration lacks the capacity to adapt--and it may not even be committed to adapting. They'll do anything to distract. We live in a country in which the Governor of Georgia explained his delayed reaction by confessing ignorance:

those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad, but we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.

Hell, we knew that in January!

The country we live in has a president who starts his coronavirus press briefing by telling us he's #1 on Facebook--when he's actually 20 million followers behind Barack Obama.