The Trump administration initially approached the pandemic knowing that national concern over the health issue would make the economy suffer. The thinking was “Let’s keep the American people from getting too alarmed about the virus, or the economy will take a hit.” Therefore, they intentionally downplayed the health threat. Yet they failed to recognize that the only real way to protect the economy was to resolve the health crisis.
When it became abundantly clear that the impact on the economy would be unprecedented and overwhelming—with potentially higher unemployment than ever before—the Trump administration quickly accepted the importance of emergency action spearheaded by the federal government. They saw the need for coordinated measures by the Federal Reserve, Congress and the president to put together multi-trillion-dollar stimulus and relief packages to indicate to American workers and businesses that the federal government was there to financially support them in ways and with speed that had never been mobilized before.
But on the health side, the Trump administration has held the position that states should take the lead, even though the key to solving the economic crisis is to solve the COVID-19 crisis. For instance, despite the call from medical leaders, including widely respected infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams, the administration has taken the position that there is no need for a national stay-at-home order.
They have also declined to take charge of ventilator allocations, which has resulted in multiple states competing in bids against one another for precious ventilation equipment. And they have decided not to mobilize health workers on a national level to be deployed to hot spots on a rolling basis, as each area hit its peak, among many other federal government actions that could have been taken.
Compared with what the Trump administration has advanced on the economic side of this crisis, it has done nothing to take charge of the health side. A glaring symptom of this attitude is Jared Kushner’s description of the emergency national stockpile of ventilators: “It’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be the states’ stockpile.” The administration has maintained that it’s the states’ responsibility to take the lead in finding equipment and saving lives.
Imagine if the Trump administration’s position had been “it is up to the states to solve their own economic issues, their unemployment issues, their business failure issues and their industry bailouts. The feds are here to help if necessary, but the states need to lead the charge.” That would simply not work, and nobody for a second would suggest it would.
However, federal leadership on the health crisis is as desperately needed as it is on the economic crisis. Both require a totally coordinated national response. So it is incredibly hard to explain why, when it comes to health issues, the Trump administration wants to play an advisory or coordinating role, as opposed to the central command role it is playing on the economic side.
The question is why this clear conflict between the role of the federal government? Why when it comes to the economy is immediate, massive national mobilization by the federal government the rallying cry, but on the health side the Trump administration has endorsed a philosophy of federalism reliant on the states for leadership and a limited role for central government?
This can’t be about federalism. You can’t believe that the federal government should only play a limited role and yet dive in with massive measures to rescue the economy. You can’t argue that the United States has a limited national role with regard to our health system when we have a national Department of Health and Human Services, a national agency in the form of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and a national health insurance program in the form of Medicare. The U.S. federal government was the greatest expender of health care funds in the world long before this crisis hit. And there’s no federalist theory holding that national emergencies don’t require the federal government to take charge—that is the very purpose of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Therefore, what do we make of the fact that there is no theory of governance that explains the enormous disparity between the Trump administration’s interventions on the economic crisis and the health crisis?
There can be only one answer: a view of political survival.
If the economy were to collapse, and there was no huge effort from the federal government to rescue it, the political backlash against the Trump administration would be incalculable. There must be a similar calculation with the health crisis. A state-centered approach, the thinking must be, might somehow save the administration from blame for the thousands of deaths—especially if it is vigilant about maintaining that the states are primarily responsible for saving lives.
The difference in President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy versus his managing of the health crisis cannot be explained on the basis that his administration believes that the states’ rights “to do their own thing” is the most efficient path to putting in place the most effective remedies to stop COVID-19’s spread.
The determination must be that Trump should appear presidential by standing up every day at a briefing and taking questions from the podium, but make sure that when the nation gets angry about all the death and devastation, he can point to governors and mayors as the ones who were in charge and should be held accountable.
Policy and leadership here are totally intertwined—and without leadership there is no policy. Unfortunately, this charade of pretending to lead is equivalent to an absence of policy. But will the American people recognize it as such and get fed up—truly fed up—with the Trump administration’s decision not to lead on the health front? Can Trump maintain this dual course of massive economic federal intervention while pursuing a meager effort that pretends at federal government control of the health crisis, without a clear majority becoming so fed up that today’s high TV ratings result in low support for him at the polls in November?
When it came to the George W. Bush administration and its perceived incompetence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—a catastrophe that involved only one small region of the country—the administration never recovered. However, it is so far unclear if Americans will accept the Trump administration’s charade of leadership under guise of federalism, or if they will recognize it as the great failing of the federal government it is.
Tom Rogers is an editor-at-large for Newsweek, the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC, is the former CEO of TiVo, currently executive chairman of WinView, and is former senior counsel to a congressional committee.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
