Ghost wrote:

> 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/

I suck dick