During his Wednesday coronavirus briefing, President Donald Trump remained as hopeful as ever in deus ex machina solution arriving soon. “It’s going away,” Trump said.”It’ll go away, like things go away. There’s no question in my mind it will go away.”
As much as we admire Trump’s eternal optimism, we don’t think it’s a sufficient strategy for getting the coronavirus under control. Trump cited some rosy statistics from various states that have been recently, but didn’t note that might be because of insufficient and botched testing. He largely ignored the larger picture. More than 158 Americans have died of Covid-19, the death toll continues to mount at a rate just under 1,000 a day, More than 4,830,900 Americans have been infected, and although most will live through a painful recovery many will have suffered permanent lung damage. Things are getting better in some places, for now, but overall the situation remains grim and grows grimmer by the day”.
“It is what it is,” Trump said twice during a disastrous interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan that aired Saturday on HBO. Eager not to seem callous about it, he insisted that the coronavirus was under control to the extent anyone could control it. Meanwhile, the government’s top expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was telling CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta that America had the worst outbreak in the world and that most other countries had done a better job.
The American public will reach its own conclusion on Election Day. Trump had better hope that the coronavirus will have just gone away by then.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 