Speakers Need Research, and President Trump Gathered a Little Bit of Research About the Coronavirus. Was It Enough? I Have My Doubts.

President Donald Trump, White House Photo

Speakers need research. I have blogged about that several times.

President Donald Trump’s talk yesterday in a press conference concerning the coronavirus was, well, to no one’s surprise, a case in point. If you watch TV shows and movies about presidential decision-making – The West Wing, for example – you get the impression of wise, informed people carefully discussing important issues so they can make the most prudent decisions. How naïve. I wish this were so, but it's not.

Let’s look at how being a bit uninformed made Trump sound a little silly.

Trump wisely started by showing that he had gathered information: “I have just received another briefing from a great group of talented people on the virus that is going around to various parts of the world.  We have, through some very good early decisions — decisions that were actually ridiculed at the beginning — we closed up our borders to flights coming in from certain areas, areas that were hit by the coronavirus and hit pretty hard.  And we did it very early.” Okay, I suppose that’s all debatable, and only time will tell whether he made the right decisions. Closing borders is obviously insufficient, but it is consistent with Trump's America First isolationism.

Still, kudos to the president for listening to a briefing. The President is notorious for ignoring policy briefings, and we should all be a tiny bit relieved that he at least attended this one.

But here’s what astonished me: President Trump seemed uninformed about influenza, an epidemic that the press often compares with coronavirus:

“I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it that — and I spoke with Dr. Fauci on this, and I was really amazed, and I think most people are amazed to hear it: The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year.  That was shocking to me.”

Influenza/pneumonia has been among the top 10 causes of death in the United States for decades. Why did that surprise President Trump? Why did he say that this was “shocking to me?” If he knew nothing about influenza, why should we trust him to handle the coronavirus?

So, on the one hand, we should all be happy that President Trump received a briefing from qualified experts and acquired basic information about the possible oncoming pandemic. On the other hand, it bothers me that the President of the United States found an ordinary public health fact "shocking," that he was "really amazed."

So, yes, President Trump did his (last-minute) research. Good. But why didn’t he know more to start with? I, for one, would feel more comfortable with leadership that is not always playing catch-up with the facts. Trump complained bitterly about President Barack Obama's ultimately successful handling of the Ebola outbreak, so one would expect him to be supremely well-prepared for the current public health crisis. One might be wrong to expect that.

Do I think that all of our recent presidents  were well-informed? No. Trump just happens to be the problem this time. When leaders face emergencies – public health, foreign policy, economic stress – they are dealing with people’s lives. Our leaders should be smarter and better informed than the rest of us, not less so.

And maybe we should blame the voters just a little bit, shouldn’t we? Hillary Clinton was better informed about almost everything than President Trump, but she lost the election. Several of the Republican candidates in 2016 were far better informed than Trump, but they also lost. Elizabeth Warren is hands-down the best-informed of the Democratic candidates in 2020, and, judging from the polls, she doesn’t have a chance. Voters like to support candidates from their own group, who share their underlying attitudes. But, maybe, just maybe, we should pick people who know what they’re doing. And we should pick people who consistently gather information before they make critical decisions. Health experts are already questioning the accuracy of the Trump administration's response to the impending crisis. Not good.

Let’s give President Trump a B- at best for speech preparation this time. But, with a public health emergency looming in front of us, let’s hope for better.

P.S.: I didn't take time in this post to talk about Trump's speech organization. That was a problem with this press conference: Trump wandered rather aimlessly from one point to the next. This weakens the impact of whatever his central point was. I may or may not talk about that in a future post.