Trump's Washington is failing badly with no end in sight to pandemic battle

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/21/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-washington/index.html

At the apex of political power, a President who ought to be unifying the country seems to be using his office to indulge his own need for attention and is exclusively talking to the sizable minority that supports him no matter what.

Amid crushing economic pain caused by shutdowns, a divided Congress cannot decide whether it wants to do more to help, compounding the impression that the fractured national political system and those in it are not equal to the moment.

Every four years, the instrument of political renewal, the presidential election, offers a pressure valve for partisan angst and, for all the nation's acrimonious political divides, legitimacy to the winner. 

 

 Trump is making clear that he plans to use every instrument of the federal government to ensure he wins a second term. This ranges from the seemingly trivial -- the use of the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop to a boosterish Fox News town hall -- to the more sinister, the declassification of intelligence to fuel conservative conspiracy theories.

On Wednesday, Trump threatened to withhold coronavirus aid from Michigan and Nevada -- states trying to protect their residents by offering them the option of voting by mail in November.

Trump, who previously falsely claimed that millions of fraudulent votes cost him a popular-vote win in 2016, warned of "thousands and thousands" of fake ballots. 

 

With polls finding Biden in the lead, Trump has shown he plans to build another campaign on false claims about Obama -- this time alleging criminality in the investigation mounted into his own 2016 campaign's many and unusual contacts with Russia.

It's an extraordinary spectacle: a President running for a second term and focusing not on his own record but pinning hopes on falsifying the conduct of his predecessor.

 

"He thinks he's a builder, but he's a destroyer of everything he touches," Biden said of his opponent.