The Coronavirus threat has not gone away. According to one count, it has killed over 117,000 Americans and counting, a number which is far higher than some of the estimates for eventual total death counts that President Donald Trump pointed to at various points throughout the national peak of the pandemic. Nevertheless, Trump is still trying to depict the existence of some kind of political plot against him. His egomania is at the point that he sees a conspiracy against his public image in basic coverage of a deadly pandemic, apparently, because this Monday, he self-confidently proclaimed that the people who are critical of his decision to gather huge numbers of people for a rally this week are just trying to make him look bad.
What — does he think that he can just wish the Coronavirus out of existence or something? He tweeted:
‘Almost One Million people request tickets for the Saturday Night Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!.. The Far Left Fake News Media, which had no Covid problem with the Rioters & Looters destroying Democrat run cities, is trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies. Won’t work!’
Almost One Million people request tickets for the Saturday Night Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2020
The Far Left Fake News Media, which had no Covid problem with the Rioters & Looters destroying Democrat run cities, is trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies. Won’t work!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2020
That perspective is staggeringly willfully ignorant. No, there is not some kind of plot to keep the president from holding rallies, and no, there wasn’t some kind of mass refusal to acknowledge the dangers of people gathering amidst nationwide protests against police brutality. These protests, it’s important to note, did not include some kind of large-scale “destruction” of cities. The fact of the matter is — there is a very real danger in the Trump campaign’s plans to bring thousands upon thousands of people together in an enclosed Oklahoma arena this week. Reporting on that is not a conspiracy.
On Monday, Trump also tried to explain away the high Coronavirus numbers in the United States by suggesting they were because of high testing rates, which is a remarkably ignorant assessment of the situation. Yes, case counts go up as test counts go up — and the point should be to find no more cases! Does Trump think the Coronavirus is some kind of immutable force of nature that will spread widely whether or not we do anything? Besides, while the U.S. has conducted many tests, the country’s rate of tests per capita is 28th in the world as of early Monday. Some other countries are far ahead — the United Kingdom, for example, has conducted over 20,000 more tests per one million inhabitants than the U.S.
Check out Twitter’s response below:
