One day in the spring of 2020, I had a very unusual feeling: Donald Trump is really going to like my idea. The president and I had almost never agreed in our previous dealings. But as I waited for the White House operator to connect us, I said to myself, "This time will be different." It was the height of the first COVID wave in New York City and here was I, a progressive Democrat, asking Trump, in effect, to send in the Army. I thought it would be music to his ears.
What followed in the weeks and months after that is one of the unexamined chapters of our nation's response to the pandemic: Why our military was so tragically underutilized in the fight against Covid. At the same time, our government made minimal use of an extraordinary power that was available the whole time: the Defense Production Act.
