This is alarming
Following a relative dip in deaths from coronavirus in the United States, thanks in part to large cities and Democratic governors taking the pandemic seriously, the record has taken an alarming uptick. America has passed the thousand a day mark for coronavirus deaths two days in a row. This is why alleged violence in American cities has suddenly become the topic of distraction. Trump doesn’t want us to notice that people are now going to start dying by the thousands every day and not just the hundreds.
Meanwhile Donald Trump has created a problem in Portland, Oregon, where none previously existed. Peaceful Black Lives Matter protests were winding down there when Trump sent in federal troops in unlabelled body armor and rented vans to stir them up again. That way he could have an “emergency” talking point to distract away from coronavirus deaths.
Trump is proving once again that when an election is coming he can move quickly and move troops. Recall as Exhibit A, Trump’s deployment of troops in 2018 to America’s southern border when the “hordes” in caravans were marching north from Central America. That “emergency” evaporated the day after the election — just like this “emergency” will as well.
Meanwhile coronavirus is attacking and killing people in red states in record numbers. The folly of aping their lord and master by not wearing masks and not practicing social distancing is coming home to roost. (In a delectable instance of poetic justice, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt caught coronavirus at Trump’s Tulsa rally.) And since America has now passed the ostensible 4 million mark of people infected, and is now rocketing its way to five million, the numbers are going to get increasingly alarming.
CDC Director Robert Redfield estimates that the number of coronavirus cases may be closer to 40 million than to 4. This suggests that the death toll could reach the million mark by the end of the summer, because 40 million sick people can easily infect 60 million more. I and every sane person hopes not. We will see. Trump, of course doesn’t care, unless it hurts his re-election chances.
Not long ago Italy was scorned by the world as the example of how to do coronavirus wrong. The Italian bureaucracy is notoriously labyrinthian and Italians famously independent. But they got the pandemic under control in a way that the United States could now only envy. Even though Italy suffered from many of the disadvantages America has, it had one advantage: Italy didn’t have to endure disastrous leadership.
Trump’s red-handed mismanagement of coronavirus is the very thing Adam Schiff warned us of in the impeachment hearings, and the very thing that Susan Collins insouciantly overlooked. Stop for a moment and imagine four more years of this. Then get your ass to the polls in November, and take as many people with you as you possibly can manage. Donald Trump will have killed a million people by then. Try to imagine how many more lives he could destroy with four more years.
There are a million reasons why Donald Trump is unfit to occupy the office of President of the United States, this has been another one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.