PIERS MORGAN: In just five brief minutes of calm empathy, fortitude and history, the Queen inspired her people to overcome this coronavirus crisis better than President Trump has rallied Americans with 50 hours of rambling, self-promoting twaddle
By Piers Morgan for MailOnline
Published: 09:10 EDT, 6 April 2020
One of my best school friends lost her mother at the weekend to coronavirus.
Her mum, a delightful lady who used to cook me fabulous lasagne, was living in a care home near the south coast of England and died without her family being able to see her during her final days.
Their last contact was via FaceTime, an incredibly valuable tool in these times of enforced separation, but a horribly impersonal replacement for human contact and touch when a loved one is dying.
Meanwhile, in another care home in South London, a second great friend is quarantined in a room with her mother, also a delightful lady, who has been fighting for her life against the virus for two weeks. A fight she is thankfully starting to show signs of winning.
In a North London hospital, the husband of one of my Good Morning Britain co-presenters, Kate Garraway, is seriously ill in an intensive care unit rammed full of coronavirus patients.
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And Trump’s leadership so far has been woefully erratic and singularly lacking in the gravitas, empathy and calm, measured tone that all Americans are crying out for right now – of the kind that New York’s impressive governor Andrew Cuomo has displayed on a daily basis.
A woman arrives by ambulance to Wyckoff Hospital in the Bushwick in Brooklyn, NYC, Sunday
From Trump’s shocking complacency during the first weeks of crisis and his frequent bogus statistical claims about everything from coronavirus tests to protection equipment for health workers, to his constant disingenuous boasts of how well he is handling things, and unduly confident predictions that it will all be over soon when there’s no evidence that it will, it’s frankly been an unedifying masterclass in how not to be a wartime leader.
In fact, the more Trump talks, the less comforting he is.
Yesterday, things reached a nadir when he was involved in a ridiculous press briefing debacle in which he barred America’s top medic Dr Fauci from telling reporters whether anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine can be used to treat coronavirus patients – because he knew Fauci doesn’t think it should yet, and Trump wants to pump up an unproven ‘miracle cure’ to make himself look good.
It’s preposterous, and very dangerous, for a president to contradict his senior medical expert over something so serious.
Yet it’s unfortunately typical of Trump to try to make this whole crisis all about him and paint himself as the hero of the hour even as America lurches into a catastrophic week of inevitable record daily coronavirus death tolls.
Compare and contrast his self-obsessed podium ramblings with the concise, precise, classy and considered words of Queen Elizabeth, a woman whom he never tires of saying how much he admires.
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