Sorry, Donald Trump, no one’s buying it
Donald Trump knew there would be a pandemic before everyone else did, but if it weren’t for him getting impeached, we’d be better prepared. That’s the story congressional Republicans are hoping we’ll buy – because there’s no longer any possible way to spin Trump’s efforts as a good thing, and we can expect things to start looking a lot worse before the curve finally begins to flatten.
The trouble is that he’s not even sticking to his own party’s story, because being the narcissist that he is, there’s no way he could ever admit that he did anything short of perfect. Despite the excuses Mitch McConnell and others are making, he’s done the best job possible – and it will still be a very good job if we lose 100,000 people due to his criminal negligence.
At least a few people are clearly troubled by this – because Trump is pathetically warming up to the idea that impeachment caused him to not focus on planning for a pandemic, and because White House sources close to him are already leaking things that don’t show him in a favorable light. It turns out that back when Trump tweeted about the virus going away in April, he actually believed what he wrote – over the advice of his own experts on the coronavirus task force.
Even though the World Health Organization said that they didn’t know how Covid-19 would behave in warmer temperatures, Trump chose the path that would require the least amount of work, but will probably cause the most amount of damage. The real story here is that Trump has acted so recklessly, his own task force is actively speaking out against him. This could get pretty ugly for Trump in the next few days, and likely Mike Pence who heads the task force will not come out unscathed.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making