By any reasonable metric, the Trump administration’s response to the Coronavirus has failed. The disease has not gone away just because the president may have gotten bored of it. According to one prominent tally, over 215,000 Americans have died from the disease, including 423 deaths that were newly reported across the country as a whole on Monday. On Tuesday, after months of national chaos and mounting death tolls, President Donald Trump reiterated his refusal to take the virus as seriously as the situation demands. He compared to the virus to the flu, lying about the flu’s yearly U.S. death toll in the process, which he described as significantly higher than it actually is. In a new ad, The Lincoln Project zeroes in on a singular message — the president’s “lying is killing us.”
Trump hasn’t only dismissed the actual significance of the disease in his public comments. He has also repeatedly neglected to provide the support that states need to keep their inhabitants alive. Testing lagged, as did deliveries of personal protective equipment, and the president has rarely even promoted mask-wearing, which is a simple step that could help save lives.
The new Lincoln Project ad features the following text on the screen alongside an audio sample of a ventilator:
‘A death from COVID is the loneliest death imaginable — no husband or wife, no son or daughter by your side. No sister or brother, no extended family or lifelong friends. No one to hold your hand, no one to ease your passing. Just a cold, lonely hospital room. For too many, this is how it ends today. Over 200,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID. We could have stopped it. His lying is killing us. We have to stop it. Vote him out.’
Watch the video below:
When you die of COVID-19, you die alone. pic.twitter.com/egpA4u9tNT
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 6, 2020
The president and his allies have frequently pointed to his so-called “ban” on travel from China as supposedly a critical step against the disease. In reality, the president never imposed a full ban — tens of thousands of people flew to the U.S. after the restrictions were implemented. What good was closing a border even ever going to do once the virus was already in the U.S. and spreading? The president has failed to offer systematic support for the so-called lockdown measures necessary to keep Americans from dying; instead, he has pretended like “lockdowns” are meant to make him look bad. This is all ludicrous.
Check out Twitter’s response to the new Lincoln Project ad below:
