CNN’s Chris Cuomo says other people can’t rely solely on the Trump administration’s leadership to weather the coronavirus pandemic.
With the coronavirus sufferers at disgusting levels, Americans learned Monday that no one was safe from Covid-19, not even the guy who intends to keep Americans safe. The announcement that U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien tested positive for the virus poses a rapid threat of physical fitness within the White House Walls, while serving as a disturbing metaphor for more general control of the administration of coronavirus crises. If the government simply doesn’t remain a senior public official like O’Brien, it doesn’t build the trust it can do for us.
O’Brien’s diagnosis of Covid-19 is a short-term fitness emergency. While others at the White House, adding to one of Donald Trump’s private valets, tested positive in the past, O’Brien’s exposure is alarming because of the staff he deserves to communicate with, not to mention the neighborhoods in which he operates. . The nature of the way the White House is structured, along with demands for O’Brien’s work, means that a critical body of U.S. government workers may have been exposed to the virus, President Donald Trump himself added.
Typically, a national security adviser works daily with the president, vice president, staff leader, and other cabinet officials, adding the Presidential Daily Report (PDB) in the Oval Office, National Security Council meetings in the stage room in my fair percentage: the room is usually quite full), preparation calls from foreign leaders in the user, and more. I can tell you from experience: social estrangement is not an option in many of these contexts without ordinary measures.
A national security adviser also generally works with at least dozens of other national mission-critical security bodies every day, adding direct subordinates from the NSA, NSC staff who come to meet or tell him, his PBO official, and many others. . In the absence of physical renovations in the “suite” of offices where the NSA works, the staff is incredibly close: I was less than an arm away from my colleague the two years I begged a former national security adviser. Needless to say, we’ve come a long way.
The White House said O’Brien had mild symptoms and that The National Security Council paintings “continue uninterrupted.” But O’Brien’s diagnosis means that a fatal virus can persist in the west wing corridors for some time.
To make matters worse, O’Brien did not restrict their interactions. He recently travelled to Europe with assistants and secret service agents, where he met with opposite numbers from Britain, France, Germany and Italy. A photo posted through the NSC shows its status in combination without a mask.
Weigh the demands of your paintings with a desire to stick to the rules of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. It is a picture in balance, however, O’Brien’s foray abroad would possibly have inadvertently exposed more people to the virus, either at home or abroad, if he had. Array photos shared through O’Brien’s White House visiting an American World War I cemetery in France also show it without a mask. He also did not wear one when he met with the hounds in mid-July.
It’s true that we don’t know exactly when or how O’Brien got on with the virus. He reportedly said he thought he had contracted it with his daughter, however, since his ability to report for paintings is so vital to our national security, it is unstopcable that he (and other senior officials) would not take every imaginable security measure to protect himself. and all those they come into contact with.
The White House deserves to have encouraged staff to stick to CDC rules at all times, whether on and off the White House campus. The president and other senior officials possibly tried to blame O’Brien for not paying attention to his time, but in fact did not set the right tone for compliance, regardless of location. Months without masks and reporting clinical evidence did not motivate staff to take CDC rules seriously.
The White House said there was no threat of exposure to Trump or O’Brien’s vice president, Mike Pence, but someone wants to reconsider their communications content. O’Brien reportedly worked from an offsite location for days, as well as a brief stopover at the White House on Thursday, when he left abruptly. Trump also said he hadn’t noticed O’Brien recently. But that shouldn’t improve Americans’ sleep at night.
While there is no threat of exposure to O’Brien when offsite, the White House does not appear to spend much time with the guy who is intended to be his top senior adviser in everything similar to the national. . Security. O’Brien was last seen with Trump during the president’s July 10 vacation at CENTCOM headquarters in Florida. Trump and O’Brien’s lack of contact can simply be attributed to O’Brien’s vacation, but despite this, crisis communications do more harm than good.
We know from Trump’s Twitter feed that he spends a lot of time watching TV and that he and O’Brien haven’t noticed for a long time. It’s a public admission that they don’t do traditionally non-unusual things together, like holding NSC meetings, preparing calls abroad, receiving information about the BPA, and more. For a long time, there have been good reasons why Trump would probably spend more time with his “security” advisers on television than with his own NSA, and White House comments about O’Brien’s infection seem to verify this.
While we expect O’Brien’s rapid recovery, we will also have to hope that the Covid-19 epidemic can be temporarily contained because it is a security breach. At the operational level, there are interruptions when a senior official is unable to carry out his task completely. The White House has not said that O’Brien works in limited hours, however, after running for an NSA for years, I know that it is simply not imaginable to do his homework entirely from home, even with a secure home facility or normal intelligence services. . deliveries by mail. This makes the game box even more asymmetrical compared to other countries that have a full equipment on deck.
The White House seeks to paint a message of continuity of operations and stability because it knows how bad it is to have a public servant at this point operating at a minimum capacity. The editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times tweeted Monday about how this progression shows the virus is out of control. The Global Times is published through the spokesman for china’s ruling Communist Party, the People’s Daily, and the tweet deserves to be considered as a component of Chinese PCCh’s influence operations opposed to the United States, but the editor is not about this diagnosis. and what it says about how much we deserve to engage the virus.
More generally, the fact that the White House has not been able to save its most sensible security adviser sends a frightening message about the administration’s responsiveness to Covid-19: at best, it is insufficient.
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