THE MOMENT REQUIRED A BUSH, BUT WE HAD A DONALD:

Nightmare Scenario, the new book from Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, tells the dismal tale of Trump's transformation during this crucial time, offering White House insiders' perspectives on how America's pandemic response went terribly wrong. In their telling, Trump was "a president uniquely ill-suited to lead" the nation through this horrible trial, and his fundamental inability to confront the reality of the pandemic made his administration's failure inevitable. While he did sometimes allow the country's top public health officials to counsel him and shape his response during the early stages of the pandemic, it was, the authors argue, only a matter of time before he began to treat the virus and all who believed in its seriousness as a personal affront--transforming what could have been a unifying crucible for the United States into yet another source of bitter culture-war enmity.

By providing a glimpse of the bureaucratic struggles to define the nation's strategy for dealing with COVID-19, which mostly ended in muddy confusion and bad feelings, Nightmare Scenario allows us to imagine an America in which the pandemic did not lead us to fall to pieces. The authors themselves believe that the best way of achieving national unity and beating the virus would have been for the whole country to get behind its scientific experts. Their brief for that position, however, is conclusory and unpersuasive.

Far more important is the way in which their book allows the attentive reader to see the limits of bureaucratic politics in action. In the course of their narrative, the White House Coronavirus Task Force attempts to figure out what should be done. Its members ably represent a number of important contrasting viewpoints, but they rarely seem to be able to hash out any of their differences. Their arguments "just kept repeating themselves on a nonstop loop," leading one participant to walk right out of his White House job. Throughout their account, Abutaleb and Paletta make clear that the task force's leaders, first HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then Vice President Mike Pence, did not provide a clear sense of purpose for the group; both were torn between satisfying Trump's mercurial instincts and listening to the advice of the public health officials around the table. But the task force's inability to resolve issues shows a profound mismatch of a decision-making body with the problems it was charged with handling. The problem was that, by framing everything as a question of public health, the participants in these debates left each other no room for compromise or creative thinking. The members of the task force dug in to litigate either side of binary options. Once they were duly entrenched, there was very little hope for making progress.

In some instances, the sensibilities of the Trump White House really do seem to have doomed the federal government's response. What makes some of the episodes related by Abutaleb and Paletta so very painful to read is that there were capable people working hard and thinking creatively about how to combat COVID-19, but they were often stymied by those who were more interested in maintaining a narrative of complete triumph over the virus, which was (usually) the president's preferred story.

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