COVID-19: America is doing great - Trump.
President Donald Trump says the country is going great in a pandemic that just infected its four millionth US victim and is killing 1,000 people a day. But his claim is based on a brazen confidence trick, requiring Americans to ignore his responsibility for the spike in the southern and western states as he claims credit for the success of northeastern states that suppressed the disease after not heeding his advice to reopen before the virus was under control.
And that might not even be the most outrageous thing the President said at his third briefing in as many days.
The President, after months mocking mask wearing and social distancing guidelines, trawled for credit and claimed he was setting an "example" after deciding to cancel Republican convention events in Covid-battered Florida.
Though deeming the situation too dangerous to hold the quadrennial political showpiece, he nevertheless insisted that it was perfectly safe for children to go back to school full time in a few weeks.
Trump used northeastern states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, which lowered their infection curve with strict stay-at-home orders, as part of a misleading argument that much of the US was free of the virus. What he didn't say is that those states succeeded because they ignored his calls to reopen.
"That's really very much indicating where the problems are," Trump said, referencing a map showing less virus penetration in the Northeast and central plains states, where fewer people live, than across the sunbelt.
"You see from that -- it's in great shape, lots of it," Trump said.
"The Northeast has become very clean. The country is in very good shape other than if you look south and west, some problems that'll all work out," the President said.
States that disregarded scientific advice to satisfy government benchmarks on reopening, many led by pro-Trump governors and that backed him in 2016 -- like Texas, Florida and Arizona -- are now in the middle of a Covid-19 nightmare. Florida, for example, registered 10,249 new cases and 173 additional deaths on Thursday, breaking the previous record of 156 deaths on July 16, according to the state's department of health.
Trump also complained that a dozen European countries and Taiwan and South Korea were sending their kids back to class and America wasn't, ignoring the fact that those places had competent central governments that beat back the virus properly. Trump, however, failed to provide the leadership and nationwide testing and tracing system that might make a resumption of school a viable proposition along with a full reopening of the economy. The United States currently has more infections and deaths than any other nation.
"This isn't about politics, this is about something very, very important. This is not about politics," Trump said about his return-to-school push, after months in which politics and not science appeared to be the primary driver of his response to the worst domestic crisis since World War II.
Still, if Thursday's erratic half-hour briefing did not provide medical clarity, it did offer some insight into the President's electoral thinking. His decision on his convention acceptance speech — that he had previously demanded should go ahead and had moved from North Carolina after officials said it was not safe -- made one thing clear: he finally understands that his denial and neglect of the pandemic gravely threaten his reelection.
Comments
Post a Comment