This could be the week that Trump panics about COVID-19

I recently wrote that President Donald Trump has underreacted to crises during his presidency, a sharp contrast to his overreactions as a presidential candidate in 2015 and 2016. His response to the new coronavirus, now labeled covid-19, was typical of that trend, like when he claimed on CNBC, "We have it totally under control."

This observation came with two warnings, however. First, ″Trump, now that he is president, wants to minimize any possible emergency that would blow back on him, rather than call attention to the possibility of something serious. . . . Trump hates to admit error, so he's locked in now." Second, "If Trump starts to overcorrect to the coronavirus, the results are likely to be counterproductive."

I'm beginning to wonder if this is the week that Trump overcorrects.

There are signs that the coronavirus will be difficult to contain from here on out. Over the weekend, Italy and South Korea reported significant spikes in confirmed cases. The Washington Post on Feb. 22 reported a somewhat disconcerting story about how covid-19 is no longer an outbreak, or even an epidemic. The proliferation of emergent cases that cannot be traced back to China suggests that the spread of the new coronavirus is entering pandemic territory, defined as epidemic-level infections across countries and continents.

According to the Post article, "Amid an alarming surge in cases with no clear link to China, infectious disease experts believe the flulike illness may soon be impossible to contain. The language coming from the [World Health Organization's] Geneva headquarters has turned more ominous in recent days as the challenge of containment grows more daunting." Given the long incubation period, this seems pretty likely.

Note that categorizing something as a pandemic is about its pervasiveness, not its lethality. Still, it is possible that up to two-thirds of the world's population will be infected with COVID-19. And no, before you ask, travel bans will not stop it.

Is the Trump administration prepared to cope with a pandemic? There are some reasons for concern. On Feb. 20, The Post reported on the conflicted decision-making involving the return of Americans who had been quarantined on a cruise ship docked in Japan. Senior Trump officials went against the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and brought back infected passengers and uninfected passengers on the same flight. That seems like a risky choice.

When Trump learned about it, he was irate because he had not been briefed before the decision was made. The Post reported Feb. 21 that Trump was "furious" about being left out of the loop and yelled at Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, the point person running the president's coronavirus task force. This fits with a larger pattern of Trump not liking it when news breaks without him having been briefed in advance.

This speaks to a larger problem Trump will face. For the federal government to handle a pandemic, there needs to be tight coordination, trained personnel, a clear chain of command in the executive branch and the ability for quick decision-making.

This all conflicts with Trump's recent moves in the area of national security, intelligence and the role of science in the executive branch. The National Security Council staff has been cut by more than a third. The same White House official in charge of 5G policy is also on the coronavirus task force, which does suggest that the staff might be stretched a bit thin. Not that the NSC matters much at this point. The New York Times reported Feb. 21 that Trump's national security adviser and D-team all-star Robert O'Brien distributes printouts of the president's tweets to guide policymakers. They note that "developing policy is not really Mr. O'Brien's mission." Instead, O'Brien is "a loyalist who enables his ideas instead of challenging them." This could be a problem in, you know, formulating a coordinated response to COVID-19.

Trump's obsession with loyalty über alles matches his moves in the intelligence community. Trump loyalists also seem keen to purge the administration of anyone viewed as resisting the president's impulses. Not to mention the "hundreds of scientists across the federal government who have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office." Trump's management of the executive branch has done nothing to restore trust in government institutions.

Trump wants to be the decider, and as the president that makes a great deal of sense. The president cannot sit through a long briefing, however. He's scraping from the bottom of the bottom of the barrel when it comes to staffing. Mostly, it seems, he's reacting to Fox News stories and crony requests. (For example, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., tweeted his thanks to Trump, who "that his administration will not be sending any victims of the Coronavirus from the Diamond Princess cruise ship to Anniston, Alabama.")

This is a recipe for things to slip through the cracks.

Everything could still work out well. Even if this becomes a pandemic, covid-19's long incubation period means it will take time to mushroom. That is time that researchers can use to do things like develop a vaccine or improve treatment protocols. And even though it appears as though Trump cares only about the appearance of having everything under control, that might actually correlate with everything being under control.

Still, let's sum up the current situation: At a moment when an emergent pandemic will begin to put pressure on the federal government to take action, the Trump White House has been busy weeding out experts and replacing them with toadies. The ability of the NSC to coordinate policy has been hampered, the intelligence community has been undercut just when their assistance might be important, and the president does not want anyone doing anything that could appear on the news without his personal say-so. But the president possesses neither the discipline nor the knowledge to be an effective leader.

This is not a recipe for optimal crisis management.

Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. This piece was written for The Washington Post.