morrison now admits his big lie

On the day PM Morrison admits his debt lake was cobbled together, not planned and measured, we have this priceless analysis from America of a type we simply do not see in Aus, given The Aus and AFR wanted us to believe the growing catastrophe had been well-managed and -consulted (with a few corporate barons) - at a dinner!

Michael Gerson, Wash Post, Trump’s tweets are a strategy of distraction to obscure a policy of abdication

As is often the case, a failure of presidential communication revealed a series of deeper, more substantive failures. In the midst of a crisis, the Trump White House could not even produce a middling speech because its policy process is nonexistent; because Trump has chosen morally and intellectually mediocre White House advisers;  because the president has no respect for the power of words and is incapable of public empathy or inspiration. And when Trump was given a format better suited to his style — his daily novel coronavirus task force briefings — he regularly revealed profound and disturbing ignorance.

In light of these limitations, a tweetstorm solidifying the hatred and conspiracy thinking of Trump’s core supporters must seem an attractive alternative.

Trump’s refusal to engage in traditional presidential discourse has another possible explanation. His current policy in the coronavirus crisis is not something he would want to describe out loud. Trump is now completely deferring to states — while pressuring them to restart business activity — because he has given up on a federal strategy to ensure universal, high-quality testing and tracing. It is far easier to blame the governors for future deaths and to claim the credit for future economic growth. 

Catherine Rampell is a brilliant American economic and political journalist of a rare quality.

Who could better these insights? from "The White House is presenting the Fyre Festival of pandemic responses": ~

• That could well be the slogan of this White House’s slapdash, hubristic approach to reopening the U.S. economy, which is turning into the Fyre Festival of pandemic responses.

• Rather like the organizers of that infamous, ill-fated music fete, the Trump administration appears to have contempt for nose-to-the-grindstone planning or infrastructure development. Instead, it believes that all problems — logistical, technical and medical — can be solved with slightly different social media messaging. Perhaps a new slogan. Or a more outrageous, puffery-filled, caps-locked presidential tweet.

• Take it from the Fyre fraudsters: Forget the organizing, expertise, planning, budgeting, any of that other boring stuff. When in doubt, up the hype. People want to believe.

• Most of the country has been shuttered for months. It’s been an economically and psychologically taxing ordeal, one that was intended to buy federal officials time to develop a strategy to defeat (or at least hobble) the pandemic. For much of that period, we’ve had near-daily briefings from the White House coronavirus response team. Yet we are no closer to understanding what, if anything, the federal government’s plan is for safely resuming economic activity. Or what numbers, if any, federal officials are using to assess risk.

• The public health experts at those briefings who advise hitting necessary benchmarks or building test-and-tracing infrastructure get slandered — by Trump allies, no less — as wet blankets or even deep-state subversives. Rather than doing the hard, tedious work to build out the infrastructure these experts recommend, the president and his hype-men pitch deus ex machinas — a fantastical covid-19-testing website from Google (whose announcement was somehow news to Google), a magic anti-malarial, a store-bought disinfectant. They’ve all failed, underdelivered or even threatened lives. Trump still doubles down anyway.

• Much like that Bahamian festival, we were promised luxury villas and instead given flimsy tents.

• While the nation’s top infectious-disease expert is self-quarantined — always a great sign — President Trump charges ahead for reopening. Day after day, he pressures states to resume business as usual before they have a plan to keep infections and deaths under control, in some cases before they have even a plan for a plan. To the extent that there was a national plan for a plan — a 17-page document from the administration’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — White House officials buried it. After that document leaked, the CDC released a new, White House-approved, watered-down version; and shortly thereafter, a senior Trump aide went on TV and attacked the CDC’s credibility.

• Plenty of Americans appear to want to give into the scam, the fraud, the legend. Music fans wanted to believe some arrogant millennial influencers and grifters could pull off a too-good-to-be-true festival in the Bahamas, with zero planning or expertise; what’s to suggest the boomer version of that dream team can’t solve a global pandemic?

• Other than that pile of bodies in the corner, obviously.