(This chart is from ourworldindata.org.)If you listen to Donald Trump, you will hear that the COVID-19 pandemic is virtually over in the United States, that it is under control, and that the Trump administration has done an excellent job in accomplishing that. Nothing could be faster from the truth!
The truth is that the response of the Trump administration has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, and that is due to the actions (or inaction) of Trump himself. It is one of the worst presidential failures to a crisis in the history of this country.
The following is just part of an excellent column by Paul Waldman in The Washington Post:
There are countries around the world, large and small, where aggressive government action and a mutual commitment by the population have gotten the coronavirus pandemic under control. The United States is not one of them.
Well over 2 million Americans have been infected, over 115,000 of us have died, and rather than falling, our rates of new infections and deaths seem to have stabilized at horrifically high rates.
Yet now, in a propaganda effort that can only be described as obscene, the Trump administration is trying to convince us not only that the pandemic is all but behind us, but also that its spectacularly incompetent response has been a great triumph.
This will without a doubt go down as one of the worst presidential failures in American history. And we can see now that it had three distinct (if overlapping) phases.
The first was the denial phase, in which President Trump dismissed the danger from the virus and did almost nothing to prepare for its arrival. The second was the mismanagement phase, in which his administration utterly failed to control the virus as it swept across the country.
The third was the polarization phase, in which, for his own vulgar political reasons, Trump attacked Democratic governors trying to contain the virus, discouraged social distancing and mask-wearing, and quite intentionally created an atmosphere in which loud refusal to take the measures that we know reduce the spread of infection is how you prove you’re a loyal Republican.
We’re now seeing the effects, as states where Republican governors lifted stay-at-home orders and encouraged people to resume normal commercial and social activities are experiencing dramatic spikes in infections. . . .
This pandemic is an era-defining catastrophe, and it didn’t have to be this way. It’s almost impossible to imagine a president more ill-prepared, by virtue of experience and temperament and judgment, to handle it, and all our worst fears have come true. Don’t let him or any of his lackeys tell you otherwise.
