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Donald Trump is the whirling dervish of crisis managers, telling the nation on March 24 that he wants the country "opened up and just raring to go by Easter" (April 12) and then shifting gears on March 28 by threatening to quarantine metropolitan New York City, the nation's financial and media capital.
What's going on?
After a chorus of opposition led by cool, calm and collected New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Trump backed down from his proposed Great Northeast Wall and backed a nothing new travel advisory from the Centers for Disease Control and Protection that urged New York, New Jersey and Connecticut residents to forget about non-essential travel beyond the region.
That advisory only emphasized what Cuomo has been telling the Empire State over the past two weeks of the pandemic.
And on the Easter front, Trump apparently has now abandoned his "beautiful" dream of having churches packed on the big day. He extended the self-distancing guidelines through April and now anticipates the economic resurrection will begin on June 1.
The self-proclaimed wartime president has shunned the experts on pandemics and is playing it by ear in the fight.
He can't fall back on his basic strategy of bullying an opponent because he can't bully what he refers to as the "invisible enemy."
Even the pro-Trump New York Post has had it. It begged the president on March 29 to stop "winging it."
Rupert Murdoch's flagship editorialized that Trump may have suggested a quarantine just to run the idea up the flagpole to see if anybody salutes.
It noted: "But the coronavirus pandemic requires a different approach. You can’t just throw out, “Hey, Easter would be nice” without asking if the task force he’s assembled agrees."
"You can’t — or at least shouldn’t — send the tri-state area into a tizzy while you mull about quarantining entire sections of the nation. By all means, ask the CDC and Vice President Mike Pence’s group if they think a state lockdown would be helpful. Don’t tweet it."
The paper founded by Alexander Hamilton wants Trump to "stop speaking off the top of his head" because we have enough to worry about these days.
Well done, Rupert. You should now focus on reeling in Sean Hannity and the gang over at Fox News.
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