ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL THE LAUGHINGSTOCK HAS TO GOVERN (profanity alert):

If you were to write a playbook for how not to prevent a public-health crisis, you would study the work of the Trump administration in the first three months of 2020. The Trump White House, through some combination of ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts. It failed to listen to the projections of one of its own economic advisers. It failed to take seriously what has become the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And when the White House finally awoke to the seriousness of COVID-19, the response it mustered managed to contain all the worst traits of this presidency. Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies.

There was confusion in the response from the start. In January, Trump picked HHS Secretary Alex Azar II, the former president of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, to lead his new Coronavirus Task Force. The problem was, there was already a senior official at HHS whose job was coordinating the federal government's response to a nationwide pandemic, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec.

In late February, after it was clear that the virus had spread widely throughout the U.S., Trump reshuffled his task force. He replaced Azar with Vice President Mike Pence as the leader of the task force, and added Dr. Deborah Birx, the State Department's global AIDS director and an infectious-disease expert, who joined Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as the group's scientific experts. But Trump also appointed administration loyalists like right-wing extremist Ken Cuccinelli and Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act.

Like so many things in Trumpland, the work of the task force has gotten mired in petty politics and internal turf wars. A "shadow" task force emerged, led by Jared Kushner. Officially, Kushner's team of McKinsey consultants, financiers, and old buddies from his New York business days was meant to coordinate collaboration between the government and the private sector. But it soon devolved into a typical Trump boondoggle. A company Kushner had once invested in, Oscar Health, was tapped to build a government website that would speed up testing (the site was later scrapped). Kushner turned to his brother Josh's father-in-law, Kurt Kloss, who was a doctor, for recommendations on how to deal with the crisis. That led to Kloss -- the father of supermodel Karlie Kloss, Josh's wife -- posting on a Facebook group for emergency-room doctors that he was looking for smart ideas and had a "direct channel to [the] person now in charge at [the] White House."

Federal agencies that normally play a central role in disaster-response efforts have found themselves left out of the action. Pete Gaynor, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Congress that his agency wasn't invited to join the president's Coronavirus Task Force until the week of March 16th -- six weeks after the task force was created.

Other federal employees involved in the response effort have had to respond to different and sometimes competing requests and directives from Pence's task force and Kushner's task force. "All of those roles and responsibilities should be relatively well-established," says one public-health official who's dealt with the White House. "I've heard that people in HHS will get direction from Kushner's team that directly contradicts what they're getting from the White House task force, and then trying to deconflict those becomes a huge problem."

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) says he and his staff spent a week trying to understand the Trump administration's strategy for directing the production and distribution of critical medical supplies amidst the crisis; Murphy's conclusion, as he put it in a tweet, was that Trump's plan was "a total, complete, absolute clusterf**k." When Murphy asked the White House for a call with the federal agency leading the effort to get private companies to manufacture and distribute medical supplies, he expected to be connected with FEMA, which typically handles this kind of work in a crisis, or Peter Navarro, the newly appointed national Defense Production Act policy coordinator. Instead, he was told to call the Department of Defense. "I walked away from that conversation scratching my head, like, 'Who's in charge?' " Murphy tells Rolling Stone. "DOD clearly has expertise, but it seems completely unclear whether the White House is in charge, DOD is in charge, FEMA is in charge, or HHS is in charge."

The Trump administration's reflexive bias against science and facts expertise couldn't be more clearer than in the sidelining of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the crown jewel of the country's public-health system. Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC's director, sits on the Coronavirus Task Force and has participated in closed-door meetings, but he has appeared at only a few of the dozens of press briefings held by the task force. Trump trashed the agency on Twitter in mid-March ("inadequate and slow"), and the CDC has since taken a back seat to other federal agencies in communicating with the public.

"I'm worried that the CDC is not front and center now," Dr. Tom Frieden, who served as CDC director from 2009 to 2017, tells Rolling Stone. "In every other public-health emergency in this country since the CDC was founded nearly 75 years ago, it has had a leading role. The CDC is the best source of information on COVID-19." Frieden adds, "Fighting coronavirus without CDC is like fighting with one hand behind your back."

Adding to the confusion, the White House has made crucial pledges and then failed to meet them. In early March, Pence vowed that more than a million tests would be ready within days. Azar followed that up by saying there would be "up to 4 million tests" available by the middle of March. Yet by March 31st, there had been just more than 1 million tests conducted.

Nowhere is the chaos of Trump's coronavirus response more clear than in the White House's bungled efforts to help meet the demand for desperately needed medical supplies. 

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