Unlead

Via an odd and winding road, I found myself at the New York Times website, reading what seems like yet another piece on the failure of President Trump to lead up to the standards of political leadership put forward by people whose relationship to the President is one of mutual hostility. I suspect that we'll see a lot of these, as people who have grievances with the President and his administration look for some time in the media spotlight.

In any event, the particular article I was reading is about the President's handling of the SARS-2 CoV outbreak, as it pertains to the United States. Or rather, about how the President's focus on his political fortunes and ambitions prevented him from effectively handling said outbreak. And so the piece overall is quite critical of the President. There are times when it seemed to become lost in that criticism.

For instance, the article is very clear that President Trump was not a fan of face masks as a non-pharmaceutical intervention. After the President is informed that his base of support wouldn't go for a "mask mandate" as they've come to be called, and that the President likely wouldn't have the legal authority to issue one, the story reports: "Aside from when he was sick, he was rarely seen in a mask again."

This is held up as one of many missed "opportunities to show leadership." And that prompted me to ask myself: What does it mean to "lead" in this situation?

The article dutifully makes the point that having the population cover their faces is "among the simplest and most effective ways to curb the spread of the disease." Okay, but the truth of that statement relies on a few other things being true, one of the big ones being that it's difficult to impossible to know who is and who is not infected. As a general rule, one wouldn't expect a doctor to say that someone who was clearly ill from a high-contagious respiratory infection that they could go hang out with people, so long as they wore a face mask. Rather, promoting masks comes across as the one tool that many public health authorities have in their kits, and so it's now the go-to intervention.

President of the United States is not a public health office. And, to the best of my knowledge, President Trump has no experience (or perhaps even interest) in public health. In that sense, he lacks the background required to lead in that sphere. So the criticism of him seems to be less about leadership than following. Someone else makes the recommendation to wear face masks, the President listens to this person and deems them credible, and then the President "sets an example" for other people by publicly obeying the recommendation. That strikes me less as taking leadership then surrendering it.

And so I wonder if, perhaps, the problem is the way we understand leaders and leadership. The term has always struck me as nebulously virtuous; it's good to be a leader, because leadership is semi-defined as having some kind of positive influence over other people. But leadership can also be the simple state of being in charge.

There are a lot of assumptions and counterfactuals that go into making decisions when it's not possible to formally determine which of several courses of action are best to take. For many people, the problem wasn't the President's lack of leadership, it's that he declined to direct people (namely his supporters) to a place where his critics felt those people should go. I don't know that there is a way of resolving that conflict.