Things are way worse in the US than I can imagine

(Except for the UK.

They're likely to have more deaths per capita than the US, for the same reasons, an inept government pretty much unfocused. "How did Britain get its coronavirus response so wrong," Guardian)

I've mentioned Simon Anholt's book Brand America: The Mother of All Brands, co-authored with Jeremy Hildreth. More recently, I was joking with him that the new Brand America is:

Can't do.  Won't do.  You do.  F*** you.

This article by Simon appeared even before he became president: "Is Trump tarnishing the American brand?," Guardian. It's much worse now.

First you have the June cover story by George Packer in The Atlantic, "We are living in a failed state."

From the article:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. ...

Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

An anti-Trump protester at a rally in Sacramento on April 20. Josh Edelson, AFP.

Second, economist Jeffrey Sachs calling the Trump Administration's response to the pandemic "shambolic"  ("Jeffrey Sachs on the Catastrophic American Response to the Coronavirus," New Yorker). 

From the article:

There are many aspects of any major crisis that are similar in character, in that they require governments to assess the situation with sophistication, to identify options, to come up with strategies, and to implement them. Crisis management has a lot of common points. The nature of the crisis could be geopolitical. It could be a climate-related shock or a disease.

I would say the core issues are the capacity of political leaders and their inner team, and the capacity of the institutions of governance—agencies, departments, and ministries—to be able to process information in a timely way and to be able to harness expert advice and evidence in a timely way. We live in a complicated world. If you try to wing it, as Trump does, you end up with more than forty thousand deaths. If you want to solve a problem, you have to be systematic about it, and know whom to turn to and how to listen and amass evidence. For politicians, that doesn’t necessarily come naturally, and for our President it doesn’t come at all.

Third, economist Joseph Stiglitz avers that the catastrophic response by the Trump Administration is leading us to another Great Depression ("Top economist: US coronavirus response is like 'third world' country," Guardian).

Fourth, incredibly disturbing interview with psychiatrist Bandy Lee, about the potential for serious violence on the part of Trump and his supporters ("Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee: Lockdown protesters resemble “child soldiers” and “urban gangs”," Salon).

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Notes

1. Sweden's touted response of no stay at home orders has led to a much higher per capita death rate than neighboring countries ("The Grim Truth About the “Swedish Model”," Project Syndicate).

2. Fox News is starting to backtrack on hydroxycloroquine, which doesn't seem to be having the effect that was touted.

3. President Trump says Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is moving too fast on reversing restrictions ("Georgia’s reopening plan gets thrown a curve as Trump criticizes Kemp," Atlanta Journal-Constitution), after Trump spent the weekend promoting protests around the country against stay at home orders--conveniently in states run by Democratic Governors.