https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/26/politics/trump-covid-death-toll/index.html
Sometime in the next few days, the 100,000th American will succumb to Covid-19 in a pandemic that President Donald Trump once predicted would just "miraculously" disappear.
Yet
despite, and perhaps because of, his earlier cavalier attitude, Trump
spent the long holiday weekend bemoaning everything but the tragic roll
call of death -- while also finding time to claim he got "great reviews" for handling the crisis.
And he indulged his preoccupations on
his tax returns, Hillary Clinton, Fox News, slanders against MSNBC host
Joe Scarborough, the Russia investigation, Joe Biden's mental health, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions,
mail-in voting in November and highlighted dangerous and unproven
Covid-19 therapies promoted on conservative media he has tested himself.
After three years of Trump deliberately
trampling the normal codes of presidential behavior -- partly to show
supporters he remains an anti-elite outsider, none of this is
surprising.
But that doesn't mean
it isn't jarring, as the most wrenching moment so far approaches in the
nation's battle against a pandemic that while ebbing in terms of total
deaths is trending up in 18 states, is steady in 22 and easing in 10
more. More than 98,000 people in the US
have now died from the coronavirus and more than 1.6 million have been
infected. More than 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and the
unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels.
There was little evidence of a deeper
meaning to his presidency at this stage than personal and political
grievances. Also missing is a more sweeping policy framework for a
potential second Trump term. And other than a relentless push to support
an aggressive opening of the country, for instance in a new demand for
schools to open, Trump seems far less interested in how the task can be
accomplished safely -- other than retweeting CDC hand washing advice --
than his boiling political feuds.
An examination of Trump's behaviour over the last three years yields an explanation.
ReplyDeleteGo through every scandal and crisis he's dealt with. They are all time-limited, sometimes lasting a few weeks at most, usually just a few days. On the other hand, this crisis will last well into his second term. But he doesn't have the attention span. It's been a few months. He's moved on and is trying to generate a new scandal because he's bored with it.