‘Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus’

Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, and David E. Sanger, reporting for The New York Times:

Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.

Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.

But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.

Absolutely riveting — and infuriating, and terrifying — account of how the U.S. response went so terribly wrong. Devastating assessment of Jared Kushner (no surprise) and Dr. Deborah Birx (a bit surprising).

★ Saturday, 18 July 2020