Conservative angrily pins blame on 'Captain Chaos' Trump for making coronavirus fallout worse than it should be

In an uncompromising piece for the conservative National Review, columnist Kevin Williamson launched a full-throated attack on President Donald Trump for having a hand in making the coronavirus crisis even worse than it should be.

Using the economic devastation wrought by the expanding epidemic as a springboard, the columnist said the president is in large part responsible as the country reels.

Noting that one of his NRO colleagues wrote, "Some of Trump’s self-appointed surrogates in the media, such as Rush Limbaugh, declared fears of coronavirus were 'being weaponized' by the media to scare Wall Street and hurt Trump’s re-election. The word 'hoax' keeps popping up across social media among his defenders. Trump seemed to take a Wall Street First approach to the potential pandemic, sending White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow out onto television and instructing people to buy the dip," Williamson put the blame on the president. 

"As I write this, Sean Hannity is on the radio, sounding like a man on a pogo stick and engaging in some serious hand-waving over President Donald Trump’s performance, complaining that the Democrats are acting as though the president cooked up the virus in a lab with the Kremlin bio-terror team. That’s the word from the Oval Office: 'Not my fault!' The buck doesn’t stop here anymore," he charged before really going off on Trump.

"Captain Chaos has been on Twitter, sneering and snorting and hectoring, and firing his chief of staff for the third time, and, inexplicably, sharing a meme depicting himself as Nero fiddling while Rome burns," he elaborated before adding, "Sometimes, a disruptor-in-chief is the thing you want. Sometimes, a disruptor-in-chief is the last thing you want."

According to the columnist, the president's failures began well before the current batch of troubles pummeled the country under his leadership, citing his attempts to build a border wall and limit immigration. 

As for the current health crisis, Williamson said it might be best if the administration officials trying to contain the epidemic leave him out of the loop lest he mess that up too.

"What will the U.S. government under the leadership of Donald Trump do in response to the coronavirus as the outbreak grows? Nobody knows. Donald Trump will be the last to know. Why would anybody bother telling him? Will the response be effective and competently administered?" he wrote. "We have cities full of people, many of them children, who haven’t been inoculated against ordinary diseases because they have fruity ideas about vaccines — ideas that have been spread by, among others, Donald Trump."

He followed that with a harsh condemnation of the president, writing, "That is the kind of leadership we have. This is not uniquely the fault of Donald J. Trump of The Apprentice and Playboy Video Centerfold, who until this recent turnaround was boasting about the performance of the stock markets as a referendum on his leadership. But he is not exactly rising to the present challenge in a persuasive way, either."

You can read the whole piece here.