Some of the best political reporting and analysis looks at the big picture, which is what journalist George Packer does in a think piece for The Atlantic that slams President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Packer is hardly the only person who is critical of Trump’s COVID-19 response, but Packer’s article goes way beyond being simply anti-Trump — coronavirus, as Packer sees it, is simply underscoring dysfunction in the federal government that was already there to begin with.
Before the pandemic, Packer asserts, the U.S. was already plagued by “a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public.” Those problems, according to Packer, “had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity — to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.”
The Trump Administration, Packer laments, responded to the coronavirus pandemic like a developing country “with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” And he believes that Americans are living in a failed state. Continue reading.