In article <v489cf$ncdq$1@dont-email.me>, X@Y.com says...
>
> Like others before him, modern American presidents fail when they cannot
> master or comprehend the government that they inherit. This is a hard
> concept to grasp in an age when non-stop media coverage leads us to focus
> on the president?s communication skills and when presidents themselves
> value spin more than expertise. But in the end presidential failure is
> about reality, not words?no matter how lofty and inspiring or how crude and
> insulting.
>
> Contemporary presidents are especially prone to mistaking spin for reality
> for several reasons. First of all, they are nominated not by other elected
> officials who have some sense of what it takes to govern, but by activists
> and party electorates who value inspiration and entertainment. Second, the
> importance of mass communication leads presidents to believe that the words
> and activities that got them into office can work once they are in office:
> more rallies, more speeches, more tweets, and more television advertising.
>
> Nothing can be further from the truth.
>
> Presidential scholars have been aware of the disjuncture between
> campaigning and governing for some time now. More than a decade ago, Sam
> Kernell wrote a book called Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential
> Leadership (CQ Press, 2007), in which he showed that beginning with
> President Kennedy, modern presidents spent a great deal more time on minor
> presidential addresses and on domestic and international travel than their
> predecessors. All this communication, he argued, came at the expense of
> actual governing. Later on another presidential scholar, George C. Edwards
> III, writing in Overreach, Leadership in the Obama Presidency (Princeton
> University Press, 2012) argued that Obama thought he could go directly to
> the public to get support for his programs, an approach that placed
> communication over negotiation and that resulted in a stunning midterm loss
> for his party.
>
> Reality still matters, and spin has its limits?even in an era of social
> media.
>
> As long as things are going okay for most people, Americans tolerate a
> president?s verbal gymnastics. But when people are in trouble, even the
> most ardent government haters ask that famous question: ?Where?s the
> government?? And for most Americans, the president is the government.
> Following the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the
> collateral damage to the presidency of George W. Bush was extensive. His
> popularity never recovered and his second-term agenda, including bold
> changes to Social Security, was destroyed. Nearly a decade later when
> President Obama rolled out his signature achievement, the Affordable Care
> Act, the hugely embarrassing crashing of the computer systems meant to
> implement the act increased Republican opposition to it and undermined
> public confidence in the government?s ability to implement important
> executive actions.
>
> Trump?s failures during the coronavirus pandemic run the gamut from the
> rhetorical to the organizational. Every time the president speaks he seems
> to add to the fear and chaos surrounding the situation: telling Americans
> it was not serious by asserting his ?hunches? about data, assuring people
> that everyone would be tested even when there were very few tests
> available, telling people that we are very close to a vaccine when it is
> anywhere from 12 to 18 months away, mistakenly asserting that goods as well
> as people from Europe would be forbidden from entering the United States,
> and announcing that Google had a website for testing while the initiative
> was merely an unimplemented idea, were just a few of his televised gaffes.
> After every presidential statement, ?clarifications? were needed. Trump has
> the unique distinction of giving a national address meant to calm the
> country that had the effect of taking the stock market down over 1,000
> points.
>
> We have come to expect verbal imprecision and outright lies from this
> president, but that is more easily corrected on less momentous
> developments. When there is fundamental incompetence on matters of
> tremendous importance, voters punish poor results. And this is where
> Trump?s actions on the coronavirus have gone far off target. One of the
> most glaring deficiencies of his administration has been the failure to
> have enough tests available to identify those infected and to screen others
> for possible exposure. South Korea, a country a fraction of the size of the
> United States, is testing thousands more people a day than the United
> States. The failure to produce tests quickly will go down as one of the
> biggest failures in the overall handling of this disease because it
> prevented authorities from understanding the scope of the pandemic and
> therefore made it difficult for them to undertake appropriate steps to
> mitigate its spread. Other countries had tests and now state governments
> are rapidly rolling out their own tests after the CDC belatedly removed
> regulatory barriers. Even the nation?s chief infectious disease doctor,
> Anthony Fauci, has admitted that testing is a major failure?a statement
> that is most certainly not one of the president?s talking points.
>
> In this and other areas, Trump has failed to learn from the failures of his
> predecessors. When President Ronald Reagan signed into law the fundamental
> restructuring of the military known as the Goldwater-Nichols reforms,[1] he
> did this knowing that he did not want a military fiasco on his watch like
> the failed Iranian rescue mission that did in Jimmy Carter?s presidency.
> And following the total breakdown in the Federal Emergency Management
> Agency?s handling of Hurricane Katrina, President Barack Obama made sure
> his FEMA director was an experienced state emergency management director.
> He knew that poor performance during natural disasters would doom his
> presidency.
>
> During the Obama Administration, the White House dealt with a precursor of
> the coronavirus: the Ebola virus. While the scrambling eventually worked
> out thanks to decisive executive office leadership, it illustrated that
> pandemics were a fundamental national security threat. They created the
> Global Health Security Team in the National Security Council to prepare. In
> May of 2018, Trump disbanded the team allegedly because he never thought
> pandemics would happen and because ?I?m a business person. I don?t like
> having thousands of people around when you don?t need them.? Trump?s
> hurried justification for abandoning a unit (that was well short of
> thousands) showed Trump?s limited understanding of why government is
> different from business?it is in the business of preparing for low-
> probability events. For instance, the United States military spends
> billions every year preparing for wars all over the globe and even in outer
> space that may never take place. The art of presidential leadership is
> anticipating major problems and coming up with plans to mitigate them.
>
> In addition to learning from past administrations, presidents need the
> ability to anticipate reactions to their actions. The Trump administration
> has been especially inept on this dimension from the beginning. The first
> big executive order he issued, largely banning Muslims from coming to
> America, was so ill-conceived that chaos broke out in airports around the
> world as people with green cards to work in America and Muslims who had
> assisted U.S. military forces in Iraq were initially turned away. Airport
> chaos seems to be a specialty of the Trump administration. It reappeared
> this past weekend, as Americans came home from Europe in huge numbers
> following Trump?s announcement to close off travelers from Europe and
> screen returning Americans. When travelers arrived, they found vastly
> inadequate staffing at airports and were thus forced into the very
> situation medical authorities were warning against: large crowds being
> hoarded into small spaces with constant, close contact.
>
> Trump has also failed to fill top government positions and turnover is far
> higher than in any other recent administration, as Katherine Tenpas has
> tracked on these pages. The absence of expertise in top government jobs is
> especially dangerous during emergencies. Also, when positions are filled
> they have not necessarily gone to the strongest candidates. Take for
> instance leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
> nation?s top agency for infectious diseases. Dr. Robert Redfield?s
> appointment was opposed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest
> which warned the administration that Redfield lacked a public health
> background and that he was under investigation for scientific misconduct.
>
> Modern presidents inherit an enormous enterprise called the federal
> government that employs about the same number of people as the 6 largest
> U.S. companies and has a combined annual revenue that is larger than the
> combined revenues of the top 16 companies in the Fortune 500.[2] No wonder
> modern presidents have had trouble managing this enterprise?in an
> organization this big, something is always going right and something is
> always going wrong. A president who understands what?s going right can call
> on deep wells of expertise to protect himself from the failures that will
> inevitably be attributed to him. And on the flip side, a president who is
> aware of what?s going wrong can take corrective actions and try to stave
> off the kinds of bureaucratic meltdowns that will also be attributed to
> him.
>
> As Oval Office leadership fails while the pandemic spreads, governors,
> mayors, university presidents, religious leaders, business executives, and
> health providers are stepping into the leadership vacuum that has been the
> Trump presidency. They have sent workers home to telework, announced their
> own social distancing rules, and developed their steps to limit the spread
> of the pandemic. This tragedy teaches us many things about preparedness and
> public health, but it also warns us about the dangers of presidents who are
> manifestly unprepared to govern.
>
> [1] These were named after Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) and
> Congressman William Nichols (D-Ala.) and established a new era of joint
> activity and preparation among the branches of the United States military.
>
> [2] Elaine C. Kamarck, Why Presidents Fail and How they Can Succeed Again,
> Brookings Institution Press, 2016, page 123.
>
>
> https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trumps-failed-presidency/

What failures?