I look at it, I view it as, in a sense, a wartime president.

~Donald J. Trump/March18, 2020

Hearing those words, almost two months after he had been warned by his national security team COVID-19 would be the single biggest challenge of his presidency, one would think Donald Trump had signaled he now understood the threat and was willing to take it on.  Media heralded the about face and Trump’s approval ratings rose to the highest level since he took office.

But there is a difference between being in office when an enemy is waging war all around you and actually engaging in the fight.  Even then Trump claimed the battlefield was limited to just a few hot spots, and the rest of the country need not worry.  Where had we heard this before?  Maybe a September 27, 1938 broadcast to the British people by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in reference to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia.

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.

To hear echoes of Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Fourth Reich, all you have to do is substitute “washing your hands” for “digging trenches.”  “N95 masks” for “gas-masks.”  Convince mid-westerners that New York, California and Washington state are the equivalent of a “far away country.” There was no reason to believe something “already settled in principle” would not “miraculously disappear.”  And finally, why would one ever consider a national response to a “big and powerful” health crisis confined to a few blue states?

How could two men, one with the benefit of “four score and two years” history and enlightenment following World War II, be so alike?  Perhaps, Chamberlain provides the answer in his June 1, 1937 remarks at Caxton Hall upon his election as leader of the Conservative Party.

I myself was not born a little Conservative. I was brought up as a Liberal, and afterwards as a Liberal Unionist. The fact that I am here, accepted by you Conservatives as your Leader, is to my mind a demonstration of the catholicity of the Conservative Party, of that readiness to cover the widest possible field which has made it this great force in the country and has justified the saying of Disraeli that the Conservative Party was nothing if it was not a National Party.

And to what extent was Trump’s non-answer about his response to the pandemic when George Stephanopoulos asked him during a September 15, 2020 town hall, “So you regret nothing?” straight out of the Chamberlain playbook.  In the same broadcast, the Prime Minister assures the audience:

You know already that I have done all that one man can do to compose this quarrel. After my visits to Germany I have realized vividly how Herr Hitler feels that he must champion other Germans, and his indignation that grievances have not been met before this. He told me privately, and last night he repeated publicly, that after this Sudeten German question is settled, that is the end of Germany’s territorial claims in Europe.

In that same ABC broadcast Trump took the opportunity to tell the viewers he was more akin to Winston Churchill than Chamberlain.  In Trump’s version of Bullfinch’s Mythology (in which “finch,” in this case, is now a euphemism for excrement), he claims his decision not to disclose the nature of the pandemic mirrored Churchill during the Battle of Britain.

When Churchill was on the top of a building, and he said everything’s going to be good, everything’s going to be – be calm.

What Churchill actually said in a speech to the House of Commons on January 22, 1941.

Far be it from me to paint a rosy picture of the future. Indeed, I do not think we should be justified in using any but the most sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley. But I should be failing in my duty if, on the other wise, I were not to convey the true impression, that a great nation is getting into its war stride.

And four and a half years later, after a well-planned, concerted and coordinated effort by the allied forces, Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany miraculously disappeared.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP