Kidding on the square
By 
Good post pointing out how Trump has been “joking” about how the testing necessary to get control of the virus is bad because the testing numbers make him look bad for as long as there’s been a crisis, and this has clearly been driving his policy response:
The president confessing to a deliberate effort to sabotage Covid-19 testing would, of course, be a huge scandal, so his senior staff immediately began explaining that he was just joking. But on Tuesday in an impromptu interview, Trump said, “I don’t kid,” and in a tweet that morning he reiterated what appears to be his real view, which is that whether or not he has actually been sabotaging testing, he kind of wishes he was because all case growth, in his opinion, is an artifact of testing.
This is not accurate. Not only has the raw count of positive tests started to rise again, the share of tests that are positive has also begun to rise. And in certain key states, hard numbers like hospitalizations are also on the way up. But Trump’s clinging to this talking point and his ambivalent feelings about tests are anything but a joke — they’ve been a characteristic element of his catastrophic leadership failure from the early days of the crisis.
In the earliest days of the outbreak in the United States, Trump quipped that he didn’t really want to see sick passengers onboard the Grand Princess cruise ship come ashore for treatment because “I like the numbers where they are.”
Like his most recent line, that was, on some level, a joke. And his administration bowed to medical expertise and brought the US citizens on the ship to shore. But a person makes a joke over and over and over again to express something real — in Trump’s case, he doesn’t like to make policy changes that generate statistics that reflect poorly on him.
In early March, when America’s testing capacity was plainly inadequate, Trump spent a lot of time touting the allegedly low case numbers rather than focusing on improving testing to get a handle on the situation. Indeed, the very same day as he made the Grand Princess quip, he infamously insisted that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” when this was obviously untrue. The testing failures to that point were more widespread and more complicated than simply Trump doing a bad job. But as the extent of the problem became clear, Trump did not signal any real desire to fix it — claiming things were fine and demonstrating a clear preference for rosy numbers over accurate numbers, which experts have warned is an approach that could backfire.
While testing has improved since then due to grassroots demand, congressional insistence, and state policy action, it’s still not where it needs to be, and the president keeps expressing ambivalence.
Obviously, a lot of the catastrophic blundering has been at the state level, and some of it has been done by politicians who aren’t influenced by Trump. But a lot of them are, and both his refusal to provide resources and the what-me-worry message he’s sending about it is a serious problem.
The Trump administration is ending funding and support for local COVID-19 testing sites around the country this month, as cases and hospitalizations are skyrocketing in many states.
The federal government will stop providing money and support for 13 sites across five states which were originally set up in the first months of the pandemic to speed up testing at the local level.
Local officials and public health experts expressed a mixture of frustration, resignation, and horror at the decision to let federal support lapse.
Texas will be particularly hard hit by the decision. The federal government gives much-needed testing kits and laboratory access to seven testing sites around Texas. But in the state, which is seeing new peaks in cases, people still face long lines for testing that continues to fail to meet overwhelming demand.
What could possibly go wrong?