“The Ten Commandments” (1956), a hokey Cecil B. DeMille film that used to be shown every year as a Passover-Easter observance, nonetheless contains a smart exchange between Prince Moses (Charlton Heston, all lock-jawed macho posturing) and the Pharaoh Sethi (Cedric Hardwick), whose son Rameses (Yul Brynner, all legs-planted macho posturing) is trying to drive a wedge between the two. Instigated by Rameses, Sethi wonders why Moses is wasting grain on the Hebrew slaves building his city of Goshen. Moses points out that well-fed slaves make many bricks; the poorly fed, few; and the dead, none.
I thought about this exchange as our American Pharaoh — no, not the racehorse but El Presidente Donald J. Trump — contemplates the reopening of America post-COVID-19. “Contemplates” may be too strong a word for Trumpian thinking, and we’re far from post-COVID-19. But Trump seems to have thought he had the pharaoh-like power, the complete authority, to decide when we would all return to our so-called normal lives, even though he said that the states were on their own when it came to procuring personal protective equipment for its health care workers and that the federal government wasn’t a shipping clerk. (Guess he never heard of the financially besieged but essential United States Postal Service.)
The funny thing about management is that those who absent themselves from responsibility have no claim on authority. You can’t scream states’ rights and then go all federalist on everyone. The states seem to recognize this as a group from the Northeast (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Rhode Island) have formed a coalition, as have Washington state, Oregon and California. These states recognize that the economy must come back gradually — industry by industry, region by region — otherwise we’ll be right back where we started.
Trump — who had lost it at a Monday press conference over a thorough New York Times article that found him asleep at the coronavirus wheel during the crucial month of February — has now backpedaled from “total authority” mode — appointing an economic council, many of whose members were unaware that they were on it.
“I will be speaking to all 50 governors very shortly, and I will then be authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopening and a very powerful reopening plan of their state in a time and a manner as most appropriate,” Trump said during a news conference Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden. Yeah, ah-huh, sure, let’s go with that.
But there have been other pharaonic moments. Trump denied knowing anything about his name being printed on the stimulus checks in a branding moment worthy of Rameses the Great. (As he says in “The Ten Commandments,” “So let it be written. So let it be done.”) And Trump has rather grandly decided to withhold U.S. funding from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) for misinformation regarding the coronavirus in China. OK, this is an instance of where the truth lies somewhere in the middle and both sides are wrong. Sure, the W.H.O. cozies up to China — which didn’t bother Trump early on — but then such organizations have to kowtow to the big guys to a certain extent so they can get the funds to help the little guys.
But there’s no point in withholding funds in the middle of a pandemic. That’s just vindictive lunacy. And anyway, Trump’s real beef is not with the W.H.O. but with China — the obfuscating originator of the virus and maker of Trumpian products — whom he can’t afford to offend lest he upset trade negotiations, destabilizing markets further.
And Trump is basically angry with himself, because deep-down somewhere he knows he wasted precious time in February, costing precious lives.