Perhaps the Largest Failure of Leadership in U.S. History - CommPRO

Perhaps the Largest Failure
of Leadership in U.S. History
                         Helio Fred Garcia

Leaders are judged based on how they deal with their most
difficult challenges.

Inspired leaders rise to the occasion and ignite and inspire
their people to a common purpose. Ineffective or malign
leaders fail to rise to the challenges before them, and almost
always make matters even worse.

In two of my books – The Agony of Decision and Reputation
Management – I describe the ten most common mis-steps in
crisis response.

Crisis Mis-Steps #1 & #2
The most common mis-step is to ignore or deny a problem.

In the aftermath of the U.S. government’s botched response to
Hurricane Katrina, the late General Electric CEO Jack Welch
reflected on a common pattern of ineffective crisis
management. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, he
described predictable stages of crises that are handled
poorly:

“The first stage of that pattern is denial…”

Welch says that one of the hallmarks of good leadership is to
acknowledge the reality of what is happening without denial.
He says leaders need to,

“dispense with denial quickly and look into the hard stuff
with eyes open.”

And he describes the temperament that is best suited to handle
crises:

“a forthright, calm, fierce boldness.”*

*(“The five stages of crisis-management” by Jack Welch, The
Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2005, p. A20. No longer
available online free of charge.)

The second most common mis-step           is   to   diminish   the
significance of the problem.

In The Agony of Decision I identify the U.S. Roman Catholic
Church’s ignoring, diminishing, and hiding the systemic abuse
of children by priests for decades as a signal example of
these two mis-steps, and as one of the worst handled crises of
all time.

But now there’s another, and it may be even worse.

As write this post, the United States is about to reach two
hundred thousand confirmed COVID-19 deaths, with about one
thousand two hundred Americans dying from the virus every day.

The Ten Most Common Crisis Mis-Steps, as articulated in

Reputation Management: The Key to Successful Public Relations
and Corporate Communication

Trump Admits in March That He Is
Downplaying COVID-19
In the last ten days, we learned that Washington Post
associate editor Bob Woodward has recordings of 19
conversations with President Donald Trump, 18 of which served
as the basis for his some of the content in his just-published
book, Rage.

According to Woodward, on January 28, 2020, U.S. National
Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien told Trump that COVID-19
would be,

“the biggest national security threat you face in your
presidency.”

In a call Trump made to Woodward on February 7, Trump
described what he knew about COVID-19:

“It goes through air, Bob, so it’s tougher than the touch. But
the air, you just breathe the air. That’s how it’s passed.”

He then explained that COVID-19 is more deadly than flu:

“It’s also more deadly than even your most strenuous flus. You
know, people don’t realize this, we lose 25,000, 30,000 people
a year [to the flu] here. Who would ever think that, right?
This is more deadly. This is five percent [death rate] versus
one percent or less than one percent [for the flu], you know,
so this is deadly stuff.”

A Washington Post analysis by reporters Robert Costa and Phil
Rucker notes,

“At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was

no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon
disappear and insisting that the U.S. government had it
totally under control.”

On March 19, when there were 265 confirmed COVID-19 fatalities
in the U.S., Trump told Woodward that he was aware that young
people and children could catch the disease:

“It’s not just old people, Bob. Today and yesterday some
startling facts came out. It’s not just old people. Young
people too, plenty of young people.”

But he also told Woodward that he was playing down the risks:

“To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I
still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a
panic.”

It is not clear what he meant by    creating a panic, since many
observers have pointed out that      Trump doesn’t mind scaring
people about other topics. My own   sense is that he was worried
about panicking Wall Street and     causing the stock market to
crash.

Indeed, the S&P had fallen 34 percent in the month before this
interview, and the Dow Jones Industrial Index was about to
complete its worst first quarter since 1987.

Woodward notes that the tone was set at the top, but that
others in the White House also denied the severity of the
pandemic. He told The Post’s Philip Rucker:

“I think there was denial across the board… [Trump is] a one-
man band [who is] going to do what he wants to do on impulse
or on information he has… He’s a bulldozer to the staff and,
quite frankly, to the country… And he just says what he wants,
and so there’s no control. And this is one of the problems of
the Trump presidency, that he doesn’t build a team. He doesn’t
plan.”

On April 5, 2020, Trump told Woodward,

“It’s a horrible thing. It’s unbelievable. Can you believe it?
It moves rapidly and viciously. If you’re the wrong person and
if it gets you, your life is pretty much over. If you’re in
the wrong group; it’s our age group.”

On April 13, 2020, Trump told Woodward,

“It’s so easily transmissible. You wouldn’t even believe it…
This thing is a killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong
person, you don’t have a chance. So this rips you apart. It is
a plague.”

Crisis Mis-Step #5: Lie
The fifth common crisis mis-step is to lie.

The Washington Post has documented the scope and frequency of
Trump lying while president: In his first 827 days in office
he told 10,000 lies or false statements, he told 10,000 more
in the next 444 days. By July 2020, he was averaging 23 lies
or false statements per day.

And Woodward’s book now reveals just how dangerous Trump’s
lies were. In his interviews with Woodward, Trump acknowledged
knowing the following about COVID-19:

It is spread in the air.
     You catch it by breathing it.
     Young people can get it.
     It is far deadlier than the flu.
     It’s easily transmissible.
     If you’re the wrong person and it gets you, your life is
     pretty much over. It rips you apart.
     It moves rapidly and viciously.
     It is a plague.

But he was telling the nation the opposite:

The Consequences of Downplaying the
Severity of the Pandemic
As the president was downplaying the pandemic, there was no
whole of government response, no national testing policy, no
national masking policy, and no agreement on the severity of
the disease. And tens of thousands died.

On September 10, Dr. Irwin Redlener, founding director of
Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster
Preparedness and director of its Pandemic Resource & Response
Initiative, told The Daily Beast that Trump,

“has blood on his hands.”

Dr. Redlener elaborated,

“If we had the leadership we needed, I’m pretty certain we
would have been under 100,000 fatalities—and probably under
50,000 if we had been aggressive from the beginning.”

The Daily Beast explained,

“Redlener didn’t just pull that number out of thin air. In a
May study, Redlener’s Columbia University colleague Jeffrey
Shaman and co-authors simulated aggressive, coordinated,

‘counterfactual’ U.S. responses to the pandemic. They asked
what might have happened if Trump had followed expert advice
and locked the country down no later than early March.

In that case, 35,000 American lives would have been saved
through early May, Shaman and his team found.

Redlenner extended that calculation through September, and
concluded that as many of 150,000 of the fatalities to date
could have been avoided, but were caused by Trump’s
incompetence.

“The pandemic didn’t have to be so bad. Other countries with
better leaders avoided the worst outcomes. America has
suffered among the worst possible outcomes because, in Trump,
America has a weak, dishonest leader, Redlener said.”

Dr. Redlener noted,

“This is criminal negligence. If [Trump] didn’t have this
thing called sovereign immunity, I would see this as basis for
being charged with criminal negligence.’”

The President Continues to Model
Irresponsible Behavior

Two days after Bob Woodward’s release of the audio of
President Trump acknowledging that COVID-19 is airborne,
transmitted through breathing, and is deadly, President Trump
held a campaign rally in Michigan. There were thousands of
people at the rally, with no social distancing and very few
masks.

CNN asked some of the attendees why they were not wearing
masks. One said,

“Because there’s no COVID. It’s a fake pandemic, created to
destroy the United States of America.”

Told that President Trump had admitted to Bob Woodward that
there is a virus and it is deadly, the Trump supporter said,

“That’s his opinion. The truth is that the CDC says that only
less than 10,000 people have died from COVID.”

Another said,

“I’m not afraid. The good Lord takes care of me. If I die, I
die. We gotta get this country moving. What are we going to

do? Wear masks and stay inside for another year? Where will
that get us?”

Several days later, Trump held an indoor rally in Nevada, also
without social distancing and with few masks. This was a
violation of Nevada law, but Trump went ahead with the rally.
The Washington Post warned that the rally could become a
superspreader of the virus. It said that Trump’s,

“… appearance Sunday was not a misunderstanding but a
deliberate defiance of rules intended to keep people safe,
rules that were advanced by Mr. Trump’s own White House…. Mr.
Trump’s rhetoric was also disconnected from the reality of a
nation still staggering under the pandemic wave, with at least
191,000 people killed and 6.5 million infected. ‘We will very
easily defeat the… virus,’ Mr. Trump sunnily declared. ‘That’s
what’s happening. And we’re already making that turn. We’re
making that round beautiful last turn, but it should have
never happened.’

Mr. Trump plays a huckster’s game, thinking he can fool enough
of the people all of the time. The clock is running out on
this gambit. The nation is long past his misplaced bravado and
happy talk. Behind it lies reckless abandon with people’s
health and well-being.”

Failure to Pass the Leadership Test
of a Lifetime

In their March 19 interview, Woodward named COVID-19 the
leadership test of a lifetime, but Trump disagreed. And Trump
continues to speak and act in ways that are contrary to what
he told Woodward about the disease. And people continue to
die.

In an August 14 interview, when the death count was more than
168,000, Trump told Woodward, about his leadership of the
COVID-19 response,

“But nothing more could have been done. Nothing more could
have been done.”

With 200,000 Americans already dead, three quarters of which
could have been prevented through decisive and consistent
leadership, Trump’s handling of COVID-19 may be more than the
failure of a leadership test of a lifetime.

It may well be the worst handled crisis, and the most
significant failure of leadership, in United States history.

About the Author: Helio Fred Garcia is the president of Logos
Consulting Group, and teaches crisis management, ethics,
leadership, and communication at both New York University and
Columbia University. His most recent book is Words on Fire:
The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It.