By just about all available metrics, President Donald Trump’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic has failed. Over 77,000 Americans have died, and almost 1.3 million Americans have been infected by the Coronavirus as of mid-Friday morning, following weeks and months of Trump spiraling into his delusional self-congratulations for a supposed job well done. This week, MSNBC aired a devastating montage outlining the president’s abject failures. In the footage, Trump’s repeated dismissals of the significance of the pandemic are paired with grim data showing the gradually increasing numbers of Coronavirus cases and deaths in the U.S.
Trump has blamed everyone from Barack Obama to the World Health Organization to China for the outbreak’s devastating U.S. effects, but he’s the one who has stood in front of the U.S. and insisted over and over that there’s nothing to be concerned about.
As the video opens, a caption reads:
‘Over 70,000 Americans lost; over 1 million Americans infected, as a result of Donald Trump’s leadership.’
Check it out below:
The examples in which Trump has wheeled out utter nonsense in an attempt to stem concern about the Coronavirus in the name of salvaging his public image are numerous. On February 26, for instance, Trump commented at a White House press conference:
‘When you have fifteen people, and the fifteen, within a couple of days, it’s going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done… I don’t think [growth] is inevitable. I don’t think it’s inevitable.’
Later that month, on February 28, Trump insisted at a rally in South Carolina that Coronavirus concern was the Democrats’ “new hoax.” The next day, the White House announced the first confirmed death from Coronavirus in the United States.
The case was the tip of the iceberg, since while Trump golfed and mocked those who were concerned about the virus spreading, his administration wasted the time in which they could have worked to clamp down on the virus. The U.S. and South Korea reported their first confirmed cases on about the same day. South Korea is now at about 211 Coronavirus cases per million residents. The U.S. is at a full 3,913 cases per million residents, and the numbers are quickly rising. On every single day since March 31, the U.S. has reported an average of 20,000 cases or more a day, and sometimes, the figures have been much higher.
Trump’s excuses for his behavior have been widely variable. For instance, as documented in the new MSNBC montage, Trump has claimed that his administration inherited defective Coronavirus testing equipment from the Obama administration. That’s impossible, because no Coronavirus tests existed during Obama’s tenure, because the disease had not been identified. Trump’s own administration is the one that dropped the ball and squandered the opportunity to implement the widespread early testing that could have given authorities the chance to stem the spread of the disease.
Next up is the question of safely reopening the economy via lifting the social distancing measures that have been implemented in attempts to stem the spread of the virus. Trump’s reopening plans — or lack thereof — have taken their toll. The University of Washington now estimates more than 134,000 total Coronavirus deaths in the U.S.
