US was beset by denial, dysfunction as coronavirus raged Published on April 05, 2020 at 06:03AM by Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, The Washington Post WASHINGTON - By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president - and the coronavirus the enemy - the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history - banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear, and confining 230 million Americans to their homes in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen adversary. Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sust