The criticism of President Trump’s response to the Wuhan Red Death has been all over the map; in general whatever he does is wrong, regardless of whether Blue politicians have done the same or worse in their own bailiwicks, and whatever he doesn’t do is a crime of omission. He’s been faulted at every step either for assuming dictatorial power, or for not assuming dictatorial power. This is always done in hindsight, of course, and without regard to truth or falsehood, because, as George Orwell explained so well, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — and our media, who still regard themselves as controlling the present, do what they can every day to control the past. The “memory hole” is very real, and they make liberal use of it, on the (mostly correct) assumption that most people don’t remember much at all about the chronology of events even a few weeks old. (This is why, for example, we don’t hear much about Nancy Pelosi telling people to get out and eat in Chinatown more than three weeks after President Trump had declared the Wuhan virus a U.S. public-health emergency and banned travel from China.)
Regarding Presidential authority, there seems to be deep confusion, even among some of my most highly educated friends, about the nature of sovereignty under the American Constitution. The truth, at least in terms of original Constitutional principle, is that both the federal and state governments are supreme sovereigns. This is possible because their sovereignty is limited by the Constitution to different realms: by ratifying the Constitution the States, acting as independent entities, agreed to delegate a carefully enumerated list of powers to the Union, with all powers not so enumerated reserved to the States. (This has, of course, been subject to a lot of judicial erosion over the past century or so, and much of the clarity of the original idea has been obscured and confounded by “emanations” and “penumbras”, but the principle of separated realms of sovereignty is still the default.)
Without exception, however, all of the liberal friends I have spoken to about this seem to think that the whole arrangement is a simple hierarchy. One person I spoke to said that the president was “the boss” of the state governors, while another said they had to “answer to” him. This is quite astonishing to me; I think the power-sharing arrangements of the States with the Union were well understood by even the average adult American until quite recently. (It certainly was in Tocqueville’s time; he was impressed by how much even the rustics he met knew about American civics.) There’s a lot of talk about when Mr. Trump is going to “re-open” the economy, and end the lockdown — but aside from exerting the federal government’s constitutional powers over interstate and international travel, he really doesn’t have the power to do much other than make suggestions. Most of the real power still lies with the States, varying internally by the particulars of their own constitutions.
There are, of course, some open questions about all of this. This is a new situation, and many of these issues have never been clarified in court. If you are curious, and have fifteen minutes or so, you might like to listen to John Batchelor’s discussion last night with law professor John Yoo. It’s in two parts, here and here.