A few minutes before midnight, on April 14, 1912, Captain Edward J. Smith and Thomas Andrews met in the latter's cabin to discuss the extent of the damage that had been sustained by the Titanic after her collision with an iceberg minutes earlier and what it would mean to the completion of the maiden voyage. Andrews was the managing director of Harland and Wolff and principle architect of both the Titanic and her sister ship Olympic. He had just returned from an inspection tour and was now informing Smith about what he had discovered.
The news was grim. The berg had opened up the first five compartments to the sea. The Titanic could float with a maximum of four compartments flooded, but not five. Andrews estimated that the ship had about and hour and a half to live and recommended that the lifeboats be loaded and lowered as soon as possible. It was at that point that both men realized the predicament they were in. The Titanic had enough lifeboat space for approximately 1,200 people. Unfortunately on this voyage, there were 2,200 passengers and crew on board. That meant that unless a rescue ship arrived in time, at least one thousand people were very likely going to die that night.
Smith decided that the best course of action was not to start a panic. He instructed his officers to round up as many passengers as possible but not to alarm them, lest they rush the boats. First Officer William Murdoch was tasked with trying to persuade the passengers to leave the relative comfort and warmth of the public rooms and head up to the boat deck. His attempts proved futile. The vast majority of the passengers thought it was ridiculous to be asked to leave a ship everyone knew was unsinkable and be placed in a tiny boat on a freezing ocean. The temperature that night was 29 degrees. As a result, the first few boats that departed the stricken liner were less than half filled. It wasn't until much later, as the Titanic began to list heavily, that the gravity of the situation became apparent to everyone. But by that point, almost half of the lifeboats had already been launched.
Captain Smith's decision to not sound a general alarm in order to avoid a "panic" in hindsight was a terrible error in judgment. Far from saving lives, it resulted in more casualties. Instead of a thousand people dying, 1,500 froze to death in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. The rescue ship Carpathia arrived two hours after the sinking and picked up a mere 705 survivors.
Why am I bothering to write about a shipwreck that occurred more than a century ago? Because a certain president we know all too well is actually claiming that the reason he "downplayed" his response to the Coronavirus in Bob Woodward's book Rage was because he didn't want people to panic. Right, the guy who in 2018 said that hordes of migrants were going to storm our southern border, rape our women and pillage our towns, and is now claiming that if Joe Biden wins the presidency, the suburbs will be destroyed was actually concerned about starting a panic? If you believe that, screw the Brooklyn Bridge, every bridge and road in America is yours for the taking.
There is never, ever, any excuse for inaction. As commander in chief, Trump had a responsibility to warn the general public about the severity of the virus. Had he acted sooner and with more force, tens of thousands of people would still be alive today, and the economy he loves so much would be in much better shape than it currently is. The millions of lost jobs, the more than one hundred thousand small businesses that have gone under, the unprecedented strain on our hospitals and healthcare workers, the psychological trauma that was wrought upon an entire nation, all were preventable. All it would've taken was a president who didn't have his head up his ass.
Europe, Asia, Australia and Canada all faced the same threat from COVID-19, and all of them, with the exception of Sweden and Russia, are doing much better than the United States. The reason for this is that the leaders in those countries trusted the science and took decisive and drastic measures that drove the virus into the ground, while Trump played golf and said it would "magically disappear."
Now before we go any further, I gotta get something off my chest. Knock it off with the Bob Woodward bashing. He's a reporter, not a time traveler. There are those who are saying that if he had leaked the recordings he had of Trump in early March, thousands could've been saved. What exactly do you base that on? Magical thinking?
Did Woodward have the authority to enact the Defense Authorization Act? No. Did Woodward have the authority to shut down the country for six to eight weeks? No. Did Woodward have the authority to order people to wear face masks and to socially distance? No. That authority resides exclusively with the President of the United States.
You know what would've happened had Woodward spilled the beans on Trump six months ago? Absolutely nothing. The governors still would've been left to fend for themselves, and the virus would've spread pretty much the way it did, with Blue states taking it seriously and Red states dismissing it, just like we're seeing now. In the end, it would've made no difference. Stop repeating Republican talking points. You sound stupid.
The truth is there is only one person, and one person alone, who is responsible for what happened to this nation. And that person is Trump. The blood of 190,000 Americans is on HIS hands, not Bob Woodward's. He can blame China and the WHO all he wants, but the facts speak for themselves. It will take months, if not years, to fully recover from the economic carnage his recklessness brought about. What the country cannot afford is for him to be rewarded with another term in office so he can inflict still more carnage.
When it comes to disasters, one Titanic is enough.
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