I have written many times that the Trump White House has no plan and has never had a plan for nationwide coronavirus testing, among other things, but that is evidently not true.
According to a long, extensive report from Vanity Fair, the White House has had a plan for a long time. In fact, Vanity Fair even obtained a copy of the plan.
The plan developed by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and his former college buddies appears to be somewhat light on promise, but it does call for using the federal government's power to nationalize coronavirus test production and greatly expanding laboratory capacity.
At one point, according to Vanity Fair, officials with knowledge of the plan believed it would be delivered to Trump all the way back in April, but that never happened. Trump himself began to lose interest, which we already know, and one public health expert who worked with the coronavirus task force says members of Jared's team decided they could just let the virus kill Democratic voters in blue states and forget the rest.
Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
I was going to say this is strategy for literal genocide, not a political strategy, but then it occurred to me that genocide actually is a political strategy.
To say that this "political strategy" backfired would be a tremendous understatement and it illustrates the level of stupidity concentrated inside the White House where officials placed in charge of such things apparently believed the virus would contain itself in Democratic states without intervention.
See, they didn't just decide this was a Democratic problem; they also believed they didn't need to take any action to keep it a Democratic problem.
And you know what? If they had done what they were suppose to, the virus probably would have been contained in mostly Democratic states and liberal cities. But they didn't and now the virus is exploding everything while the Democratic stronghold of New York has moved on in large part.
Refusing to implement a national strategy meant every state was left to fend for itself against a virus that doesn't care where your borders are.
Virtually everyone mentioned in this story looks bad.