Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown | Financial Times

When the history is written of how America handled the global era’s first real pandemic ... Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself...

a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie ... Trump’s re-election chances were looking 50:50 ... Nothing could be allowed to frighten the Dow Jones... what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate...

Trump was warned countless times ... daily briefings, by federal scientists, the health secretary ... trade adviser... Asia adviser, by business friends and the world at large... could have prevented mass deaths and he didn’t...

other democracies, notably the UK, Italy and Spain, also wasted time Whoever was America’s president ... ill-served by Washington infighting.. CDC ... plagued by mishap and error... did not have a true picture ... It was Trump who chose Robert Redfield to head the CDC... devout catholic, Redfield saw Aids as the product of an immoral society... lets his prejudices interfere with the science... insist on developing its own test rather than import a foreign one... scientists fighting with each other ... forced to ration tests to “persons under investigation” ... Most were denied...

began to tout hydroxychloroquine as a cure ... inspired by Fox News anchors... none of whom have a medical background... Scientists who demurred were punished ... Rick Bright, the federal scientist in charge of developing a vaccine... was removed... pressured to let politics and cronyism drive decisions over the opinions of the best scientists... pressured to send millions of dollars worth of contracts to a company controlled by a friend of Jared Kushner. When he refused, he was fired...

to keep your job ... out-loyal everyone else... tolerate quackery ... flatter him in public ... in private... never make him feel ignorant... advising Trump is like ... appease a great force that’s impervious to reason...

Republican states have received considerably more ventilators and personal protective equipment per capita than Democratic states ... stoking national disunity ...

suspended US funding of the WHO... too ready to take Beijing’s word ... some truth to that claim... too scared of offending China ... Blaming America’s death rate on China and the WHO could well help Trump’s re-election... US and China have spread outlandish rumours about the other...

Australia’s Daily Telegraph... owned by Rupert Murdoch , ran an apparent scoop ... the disease came from the Wuhan lab... the story had no substance... probably came from the US embassy in Canberra... damaged Australia’s hopes of defusing US-China tensions... caught between a reckless China and a feckless America ...

Trump’s campaign will be about China, China, China... And hopefully the fact that he rebooted the economy... It turns out retirees are no fans of herd immunity... Trump’s poll numbers have been steadily dropping ... he is a sociopath and a malignant narcissist. When a person suffering from these disorders feels the world closing in on them, their tendencies get worse.