Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Trump Isn’t Acting Like a Wartime President

The commander in chief could have put the nation on war footing against the coronavirus. He chose a very different course.

March 24, 2020 at 11:30 AM UTC

By Jonathan Bernstein

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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I received my copy of Dan Drezner’s hot-off-the-presses “The Toddler in Chief” — the first Twitter thread I’m aware of that became an academic (but highly accessible!) book — just before Donald Trump launched into another marathon press conference Monday afternoon. Over some two hours, he made it increasingly clear that this self-proclaimed wartime president doesn’t accept one of the key points of war: that they demand difficult, painful choices of national leaders.