The Bad General

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, "The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him." This means that a good general prepares to defend his nation from a attack instead of assuming that the nation is safe from all enemies. We have a president with no military experience who has claimed that he knows more about Islamic State (known as ISIS to many) than the generals. On January 20th, a man who traveled from Wuhan, China, to Washington state became the first person to be diagnosed with a coronavirus or COVID-19 infection, the same disease that killed thousands in Wuhan. On the same day, the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in South Korea. The South Koreans acted swiftly to deal with the disease, testing thousands of people and putting them into quarantine, in effect, fighting the attack with a fast counterattack. Two months later, they have almost finished winning the battle. They have few than 4,000 active cases. Total deaths: 169.

How did our president rise to the occasion of defending America from this global pandemic? Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Trump claimed that we have it totally under control. "It's going to be just fine," he said.

Sun Tzu: "Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand." When the Chinese first deciphered the genome of COVID-19, they converted it into a data file that they uploaded to the internet so that everyone could use it to create tests for the virus. The Germans did this immediately and have succeeded in keeping the number of cases down as a result of massive testing of their citizens. I began to look at the growing numbers on sites such corona.help and worldometers.info to calculate how the numbers were rising exponentially. I learned that the exponential curve needs to hit an inflection point before it can level off into what's called a logistic curve. Even though there were only 66 active cases in the U.S. at the beginning of March, I was alarmed because I saw how the exponential growth could raise that to the hundreds of thousands, even as much as a half a million,
depending on what measures we took to reduce the growth rate, measures such as social distancing. Most other people were not alarmed. Trump was saying this was a hoax created by the Democrats to stop his election. "One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," he said in February. But the numbers kept rising like the grains of rice in that story about the king of India who paid the inventor of the game of chess by doubling the number of grains of rice for each square on the chess board. There are just a few grains in the beginning, but after a enough squares are added, the number of grains is so high that that rice has to be stored in warehouses. Only in the middle of March, when fears of the pandemic made the stock market crash, did Trump declare a national emergency. He had the gall to call himself a "wartime president" even though he had spent six weeks dismissing the disease as no threat. As of this writing, over 5,000 Americans are dead. There are over 200,000 active cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and the numbers are still spiking. This is not a wartime president. This is a fool who has the blood of thousands on his hands. Recent scientific models created by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who works for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, show that the number of cases could go up into the millions and the number of dead could be between 100,000 and 240,000 before the numbers level off. The biggest threat to America isn't a foreign enemy. It's the president.