Dear Donald & Team,
First, please understand that, while much of the content on our site is critical of you and your ongoing disregard for the good of the country, this letter is intended to help you better grapple with the responsibilities you now face as the leaders of the Executive Branch’s response to a global pandemic which, as of this writing, has already sickened at least 5,000,000 Americans and sent over 160,000 of them prematurely to their graves.
You may not agree with everything we’re about to say, and you may even dismiss us as “Fake News” (hey, it’s in our name, so you’d be technically correct!), but please keep in mind that the recommendations herein are well-intentioned and made in good faith. Where we are critical of your actions (or lack thereof) to date, it is only to help illustrate how a new approach may yet yield a different result, both for the health and well-being of the country as well as for your chances of re-election in the fall.
Whether you like it or not, and whether you are willing to acknowledge it or not, your electoral fate in November is directly tied to your past and future handling of this most pressing issue. Given the frankly appalling callousness and incompetence you have demonstrated thus far, we advise you to recognize your failures and commit to moving forward in a more effective and empathetic direction.
To this end, we’ll borrow a format that many of you will recognize from your time in Corporate America: Stop, Start, Continue.
Let’s begin on a high note with the things you should Continue, because despite the widespread criticism of your approach to date, you are in fact doing a few things quite well.
CONTINUE
1 – Continue to employ the Defense Production Act (DPA)
You should continue to compel American manufacturing and consumer goods companies to produce the supplies–medical and otherwise–that are urgently needed to effectively combat this virus. Ventilators and masks were a great start, but you should really consider adding the following to the list:
i) Swabs, reagents, and any and all other materials used in coronavirus testing. This one should be obvious, but we’ll clarify the need for it in the forthcoming ‘Start’ section.
ii) Safe sanitizing wipes, gels, sprays, and other related products that can be used to keep people and surfaces as clean and virus-free as possible at all times. Yes, the leading makers of these products have stepped up production and are working hard to meet the surging demand, but they simply can’t keep up. As a result, prices have skyrocketed (a single can of Clorox wipes that used to cost $5-6 now goes for $33 on Amazon) and Americans everywhere are having to ration their usage of these critical supplies, assuming they can even afford to purchase them in the first place (sidenote: this smells of price gouging to us and should also be investigated).
In this case, too much will always be better than not enough. So do whatever needs to be done to increase production by 10 or 20X, and ensure that every home, business, school, and hospital has an unlimited (and affordable!) supply available to them at all times. Furthermore, given the large number of safety-related recalls issued for these types of products in recent months, you should also create a testing process to ensure that all such products are 100% safe before they are marketed for consumer use.
iii) Body bags, high-capacity refrigerated storage units, and cremation equipment. This one is pretty morbid, but the reality is that even our best-run cities and towns are unable to keep up with the number of dead bodies this pandemic is producing. In order to avoid the consequences of failing to properly store and dispose of human remains, local public health authorities must have adequate access to all necessary storage and disposal equipment. If private sector companies are unable or unwilling, of their own volition, to provide a sufficient quantity of this equipment in a timely manner, it is your duty to compel them to meet these needs.
2 – Continue to hold frequent briefings where you provide reassurance and useful information to the American public
Our country direly needs visible, stable, and credible leadership in these troubled times. And while many of your briefings to date have failed to meet these standards for tone and content, we have occasionally seen some glimmers here and there, so we know you have it in you if you put the stable genius part of your mind to it. You are the elected leader of this entire country and, whether you enjoy it or not, the responsibility for providing calm and stable reassurance to ALL Americans falls to you.
On a related note: as their name would imply, briefings should be kept brief and to the point. Don’t get distracted by critical questions or become defensive when reporters challenge you on your past pronouncements–just tell us how things are going, tell us what you’re doing right now to make them better for everyone, and then tell us how we can all help contribute to this Herculean national effort.
3 – Continue to encourage and support the rapid (and SAFE!) development of multiple vaccines
Your aggressive approach here via Operation Warp Speed is a great start, but of course we need to make sure that any vaccine that could potentially be administered to millions or even billions of people is safe before it enters widespread use. This is especially important given the large proportion of your base that describes itself as anti-vax. If they won’t even consent to receiving vaccines that have been proven safe over a period of several decades, do you really think they’ll consent to receiving a new, unproven one that was rushed through development in under a year?
So keep pushing the pharma companies to do their best possible work, provide them with whatever incentives and resources they may need to complete this work as rapidly and safely as possible, and then be prepared to fully fund and support an unprecedented effort to produce and deploy as many doses of the safest and most effective resulting vaccine(s) as the US (and the world) may eventually need. And finally (and this is probably where your own talents can best be applied) get ready to sell sell sell the hell out of the new vaccine to your supporters, because it’s not gonna do any good if ~35% of the country refuses to get it.
STOP
We’ll do this one in the middle, since it’s likely to be the hardest for you to hear. Since we only gave you three Continues, we’ll limit ourselves to three Stops as well. You may not like reading this (or hearing it, if someone is reading this to you), but you need to. Ignore it if you choose, but know that you do so at your (and America’s) peril.
1 – Stop trying to discredit your own medical experts
You are a businessman, not a doctor or a researcher, and you don’t have the knowledge or expertise to fully understand and grapple with the complexities of virus transmission, infection, or treatment (and for that matter, neither do 99% of Americans! It’s OK to admit this; it doesn’t make you weak, it makes you smart and self-aware). Leave this aspect of the coronavirus response to the professionals, i.e. Dr. Fauci and his team. He has served in his capacity as the Director of the NIAID for nearly 4 decades and has advised 6 presidents on a wide range of topics related to numerous and diverse infectious diseases. He is highly regarded across the country and around the world as one of the foremost experts on these matters, and his time in US government leadership has also endowed him with comprehensive knowledge of the institutions and resources available to drive and support our efforts to battle the novel coronavirus.
If you think of our fight against corona as a war on the virus, Anthony Fauci is one of the world’s only 5-star generals. And we already have him on our team–you don’t have to trade for him or anything! So you need to make better use of him (e.g. by putting him on TV at least once a week to give public health updates and guidance), and you need to stop ignoring his advice. When he talks, you need to shut the hell up and listen. If he disagrees with you, you need to defer to him. And if he tells you that you need to do something, you should do what he says without question or hesitation. Lives and livelihoods (along with “your” vaunted economy) depend on this, so let go of your need to argue with everyone who contradicts you, and do what he tells you needs to be done.
2 – Stop passing the buck to the governors
We are the UNITED States, not the loosely-associated-but-mostly-independent-ragtag-bunch-of-states. You have a gigantic federal bureaucracy, including various large and well-staffed departments (HHS, for starters), that stands ready to help you get control of this pandemic should you ever choose to do so.
Your attempt to evade responsibility by insisting that all pandemic-related decision-making should take place at the state level is shameful and weak. The USA has one of the strongest Executive Branches in the developed world, and you are in charge of it, at least for the next few months.
You never hesitate to use executive federal power for your own ends, such as to curb immigration from non-white nations or to deploy heavily armed paramilitary units against American citizens exercising their right to peaceful protest, so it is absolutely unconscionable that you would refuse to use it in defense of the American people in their hour of greatest need.
If you can’t muster the energy or intellectual firepower to captain the effort yourself, you have various secretaries and department heads who could shoulder this burden for you. So either roll up your sleeves and lead the effort to deal with this disaster, or pull your best lieutenants off whatever else they’re doing and put them on it, immediately. The American people, and history, will judge you most harshly for it if you do not.
3 – Stop promoting conspiracy theories and quack remedies
We all know you’re a great salesman and a gifted manipulator of the media. We all know you like to make a buck. And we all know how much you relish stoking conflict between your acolytes and the rest of the country. But the time for that bullshit has come and gone. You had a solid three years to indulge in such counterproductive nonsense to your heart’s content, and since the virus first hit us back in February and March, you have wasted the last five months indulging in even more of it than usual.
Enough is enough. It is well past time for you to swear off these distractions and get your game face on. You should of course continue to use your unprecedented social media platform, the cable networks and radio stations, and the presidential bully pulpit as often as you’d like. But, just this once, and then for the next 5 months or so, use them for the good of the nation instead of to enrich yourself and divide the American people against each other.
You might laugh it off when people question your televised recommendations to drink/inject bleach or submit themselves to UV-light rectal probes, but the reality is that lots of people are desperate here, and the ones that still take you seriously are being actively harmed by your “jokes.” So please, abandon the constant trolling and divisive rhetoric, and instead limit yourself to simply relaying the most important facts, data, and information you can get your hands on. And if you can muster it, maybe throw in an inspirational “we’re all in this together” speech every now and then. The American people, and your future biographer, will thank you for it.
START
To be brutally honest, if you didn’t like the Stop section, you’re probably not going to like this one much either. And as it would appear that your various advisers are too scared or stupid to say them to you of their own accord, we’ll rise to the challenge instead, and use this space to speak the hard truths you so desperately need to hear right now.
1 – Wear. Your. Fucking. Mask.
For some reason you decided to politicize the practice of mask-wearing back when it wasn’t even part of the official CDC guidelines, and we know how loathe you are to admit when you’re wrong, but you’re gonna need to suck it up and take this one for the team. To put it plainly, you were wrong about masks, and those of your followers who remain loyal to you are getting sick and dying because of it.
More and more research is emerging on the effectiveness of masks, and the evidence is both clear and indisputable: Countries with widespread adoption of masks do vastly better than others in their efforts to fight COVID-19. Masks are also cheap to produce and easy to use, and, if you so chose, I’m sure you could make a ton of money selling them. Why not take the design from those rally hats you love so much and stick it on a mask? Actually, we just googled it and it looks like you already have. Good job! Now all you need to do is wear one every single time you are photographed, every single time you appear in public, and every single time you appear on TV.
Just like the rest of us, you can take it off when you’re eating, sleeping, watching TV, driving somewhere, or doing whatever else it is that you do by yourself all day. And of course you don’t need to wear it in your own house if you choose not to, although since the house you currently occupy is much larger than the average American’s, and it employs hundreds of people, you might consider keeping your mask on when you’re in a room with people who aren’t part of your immediate family. Given how many of your staff, secret service agents, etc., have already contracted the virus, it’s a reasonable precaution for you to take going forward.
2 – Establish a massive nationwide testing and tracing program
This is another one of those things that you chose to politicize early on, for no good reason. Again, if you want this crisis to “just go away” any time soon, you’re “just going” to have to suck it up and admit you were wrong. Once again, just like with masks, every country that’s done a creditable job of containing and in some cases nearly eliminating their covid outbreaks has done so on the back of a robust testing and tracing program.
You think 800,000 tests a day is impressive? Let’s add a 0 to that number and shoot for 8 million. It might sound difficult, but so did landing rockets on the moon, sending rovers to Mars, and eradicating polio. In contrast, all we’re talking about doing here is quickly and dramatically scaling up the production of a few basic materials and chemical reagents. And lucky you, you have the considerable might of the US economic machine at your disposal. Use the DPA if you need to, call the CEOs into the Oval Office and make your case to them in person if you must, but just get it done.
It has been widely reported that you, your immediate family, and your closest staff get tested every single day, using tests that produce results in hours or even minutes. If a positive case is found anywhere within that group, all of that individual’s close contacts are traced, re-tested, and required to self-quarantine for a 2-week period. If daily rapid-response testing is the approach you have chosen for yourself and the people you care about, why do you continue to withhold easy access to on-demand rapid-response tests from the rest of the country?
And while you’re pondering your answer to that question, don’t forget about the importance of the contact-tracing component here. Perhaps you could re-task your army of soon-to-be unemployed Census workers with doing the legwork of following up on all the positive test cases across the country to find out who they’ve had close contact with recently. Alternatively, maybe you could ask your friends at Facebook, Twitter, and Google to come up with a software solution for you. It is unclear whether the DPA covers software products in addition to manufactured goods, but you seem cool with bending other rules and laws when it suits you, so maybe you could do the same thing here. Or, who knows, maybe you have a better idea rattling around somewhere in that very large and very good brain of yours. However you choose to do it, get it done, and get started now.
3 – Start thinking more than a few months ahead
We get it, shit is hitting the fan pretty hard these days and there’s a lot to stress out about, especially with the election looming and your lackluster poll performance of late. It is also true that you have what has been widely described as the world’s hardest job, so it’s understandable that you might get lost in the day-to-day details sometimes and have a hard time zooming out to contemplate your place in history.
But here’s the thing: once you are no longer in office, and especially once you are no longer alive, you will no longer have the platform you currently have to make your case to the American people about what a great job you are supposedly doing.
So you can yell about it all you want, and maybe if you repeat it frequently and loudly enough, some of your more credulous minions might even believe you. But in 10, 20, and 100 years from now, your actions right now and in the coming months are going to speak much louder than your past and future words ever have or could. And in the end it will be others, not you, who will tell the final story of what Donald Trump did (and did not do) to save America during the coronavirus plague of 2020.
Do you want this chapter of American history to say that while millions got sick and hundreds of thousands died, Trump chose to spend his time golfing, yelling at politicians, and denying the severity of the problem instead of working as hard as he possibly could to save American lives?
Do you want to be remembered as the lazy dunce who cratered the economy, failed to protect America from a deadly virus, got absolutely smoked by the Blue Team in an unprecedented landslide election, and then lived out the rest of his days in infamy and disgrace?
Maybe you do want these things, or maybe you just don’t care either way. But if you can’t bring yourself to do the right thing in order to help everyone else, you might want to at least consider doing it in order to help yourself.
And hey, the “right thing” in this case doesn’t even require you personally to do all the hard work. Like we said above, you can and should delegate the majority of this stuff. You just need to be the face of the response, and to show us that you are in fact doing something about this national tragedy other than denying its existence and indulging in magical thinking that it will disappear on its own.
Alternatively, if even this reduced level of responsibility still seems a bit too much for you to deal with, you could always simply resign and walk away, so that someone with stronger resolve and a skillset more suited to the times could take over.
Health experts agree that the recent resurgence of the virus places the United States squarely still within the 1st wave of infection, so regardless of what you claim on Twitter, you have to know that we are facing months, and possibly years, of hard work and tough decisions ahead of us. If you’re not up to the task, there’s far less shame in admitting defeat and asking for help than there is in pretending that nothing’s wrong and sitting on your tiny hands while America burns.
So think about the country, and think about how your actions will be viewed in the future, and then make up your mind to pursue the course of action that you think will best serve the country.
And keep in mind that doing nothing, hoping the virus goes away on its own, and holding out for divine intervention don’t count as action.
In conclusion, it’s time for you to either accept responsibility and lead, or accept defeat and make way for someone who can do a better job. If you don’t make this decision for yourself now, the American people are going to make it for you in November.
Sincerely,
Your friends at Fake News Media
