Thursday night, a cluelessly cruel President Trump scoffed at New York Gov. Cuomo's urgent, evidence-based pleas for thousands more ventilators to manage a coming surge of coronavirus cases. Hours later, after wasting precious days dragging his feet, Trump seemed to tweet that he might invoke the Defense Production Act to order manufacturers to start making more ventilators, but one never knows with him.
Crisis management in the age of Donald Trump is more about managing Trump than it is about managing the crisis itself.
The president had used Sean Hannity's Fox News evening show to deliver a cold-blooded message: Despite horrifying growth curves, despite clear scientific projections, he's got a hunch his home city and state of New York just don't need the life-saving equipment we've been begging and begging and begging for.
"I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators," said the Expert in All Things. "You know, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they'll have two ventilators. Now all of a sudden they're saying, 'Can we order 30,000 ventilators?'"
Facts matter. New York currently has 11,000 ventilators.
With cases rising at a rapid rate, it won't be enough. So Cuomo's been sounding the alarm about the need for many, many more from the federal stockpile, which holds more than 16,000, but from which just 4,400 have been sent this way thus far. Two thousand have been distributed; 2,400 have been added to New York's stockpile _ for use as needed. These weren't mysteriously "found in New York storage," as the president stupidly tweeted Friday.
"Trump to New York: Drop Dead" has been repeated often in recent days, a clever repurposing of our famous 1975 "Ford to City" front page.
Usually, it's overwrought. This time, it's dead right.
