Even by the tumultuous standards of Donald Trump’s presidency, the rapid unraveling of U.S. institutions in the first half of 2020 has been remarkable. First came impeachment, laying bare how Trump and his allies withheld $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in order to convince that country’s leaders to investigate the family of Trump’s political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Even more shocking to those who still had faith in the U.S. Constitution to restrain Trump was the unwillingness of the Republican-dominated Senate to so much as hear all of the evidence against the president. Then came Trump’s audacious firing of Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, director for European Affairs with the National Security Council, both of whom testified during the impeachment inquiry. Even Vindman’s twin brother did not escape dismissal from his job at the NSC. The intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson was next to be fired, one of five inspectors general to be dismissed in the last three months.
Impeachment and its aftermath were just the beginning. Arguably more consequential for millions of Americans was the Trump administration’s refusal to heed expert warnings about the spread of the novel coronavirus. Instead of replenishing stockpiles of protective equipment or rolling out a national testing strategy, the president downplayed the severity of the pandemic and falsely claimed that the United States was prepared to contain it. Misinformation spread by Trump (and repeated by his allies on Fox News) in the early days of the outbreak appears to have accelerated the spread of the virus, which has now claimed more than 100,000 American lives.
