Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan has distinguished himself as one of the more competent and creative governors when it comes to the response to the coronavirus. Now, he’s out with a blistering account of his dealings with the White House that paints a disturbing portrait of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, and it’s quite disturbing.
The gist of it is that despite Trump’s constant boasts of how anybody who wanted to get a coronavirus test could get one, the U.S. lagged way behind other countries when it came to testing, and the White House sent the message that states would be on their own when it came to figuring it out.
Hogan recounts the dramatic moment in April when a Korean Air flight landed at BWI carrying 500,000 test kits that Maryland had purchased for $9 million. The shipment had to be protected by the Maryland National Guard for fear the federal government would try and seize the masks, as the feds did for N95 masks purchased in Massachusetts.
What’s amazing is that Hogan explains that the only way he was able to obtain the tests was that his wife Yumi happened to have been born and raised in South Korea, and her status as the first lady of an American state had helped make her a bit of a celebrity in the country. “On Saturday, March 28, I asked Yumi to join me on a call with Ambassador Lee [Soo-hyuck]. We spoke about the special relationship between Maryland and Korea, and Yumi made a personal plea in Korean, asking for the nation’s help.”
It’s pretty insane that during a pandemic a governor is forced to leverage a personal relationship and beg for help from a foreign country because he cannot depend on the American president.
Hogan recalls a conversation in late March he had with National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins, in which Collins asked if Maryland could be of any help to the NIH. “I don’t even have enough tests for my immune-compromised patients or for my staff,” Collins told him, as Trump was publicly boasting about U.S. testing capacity.
In the piece, which was published in the Washington Post, Hogan explains how jarring it was for governors to hear expert warnings about the threat posed by the virus on the one hand and Trump’s happy talk on the other, knowing that Trump was listening to the same warnings.
“During the retreat in D.C., the Republican Governors Association sponsored a private dinner with the president,” Hogan recounts. “Backstage beforehand, I said hello to him. We took a photo together. He was perfectly cordial, even though we’d criticized each other in the past. Then he came out and gave one of his unscripted rally speeches that seemed to go on at least an hour too long. I don’t remember him mentioning the virus, but he talked about how much he respected President Xi Jinping of China; how much he liked playing golf with his buddy ‘Shinzo,’ Prime Minister Abe of Japan; how well he got along with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.”
“Then, the jarring part: Trump said he really didn’t like dealing with President Moon from South Korea. The South Koreans were ‘terrible people,’ he said, and he didn’t know why the United States had been protecting them all these years. ‘They don’t pay us,’ Trump complained.”
That is an awful way to describe an ally.
If Trump goes on to lose the election, there will be many elaborate explanations for why he lost. But the biggest barrier to his reelection is plainly the fact that when presented with a crisis, Trump has been unable to rise to the occasion. Instead, he’s continued his erratic leadership, obsession with petty grievances, focus on his fragile ego, and displayed the dangerous drawbacks of his short attention span.
