Whether the coronavirus started in a Wuhan wet market or a Chinese lab (no one knows; most rational observers lean toward the wet market, President Donald Trump leans toward the lab), the United States now has, by far, the biggest share of cases of the pandemic, with no cure on the immediate horizon and most experts saying that even if new cases start to decline, the decline will be short-lived as new case numbers continue to go up and down for a while pending breakthroughs in testing and treatment, which I hope will come soon.
As a matter of scrupulous accuracy and fairness of a sort seldom practiced by Trump, I should note that the United States has a larger population than most countries and others have been hard hit, including especially Italy and Spain in the early stages of the pandemic. But the United States has, since at least March, been viewed as the “epicenter” of the pandemic.
Trump, whose lies become more transparent and desperate every day, says he’s done a great job of dealing with the threat, and I’m not aware of any syllable from him admitting to any errors on his part that might have contributed to our unenviable position at the epicenter. According to me, he’s done and is still doing a terrible, terrible job of limiting the spread of the virus across the United States or dealing with it now, although he continues to lie about it and minimize it every day.
I would like see to him asked, explicitly and repeatedly, if necessary, why, if he has done such a great job, have so many other countries had better success at limiting the size of the pandemic, compared to the U.S. numbers?
The Washington Post just published a review of the story so far. You don’t need to read another word of mine this afternoon if you would just go to the Post piece. It is sad, frightening, devastating to Trump and struck me as authoritative. Here’s the link.
If you need more urging, I’ll just focus for a second on Trump’s lying. It’s very hard for me grasp why any American who has lived through the rise of current incumbent credits anything he says. Maybe the answer is that everyone knows he lies constantly, but a great many don’t care, or don’t care enough to let it outweigh all the great things they believe he’s doing for the country.
But the lying is so shameless and so blatant that I just want to highlight a little video that was embedded in the Post piece, but which the paper also published previously. The video shows Trump saying various things relative to the pandemic and his actions regarding it that he later, apparently, wished he hadn’t said because they later sounded wrong or stupid. The video shows him saying these things and then shows later video in which he was subsequently asked about the things, which had turned out to be wrong or foolish in retrospect, denying that he said them.
It’s hard for me to understand the 40 percent or so of Americans who continue to “approve” of the way Trump is handling his job. I wonder how they feel about the lying. Are they unaware of it? Do they not think it’s important to tell the truth? Or, perhaps, do they wish he would lie less often but excuse it on the grounds that all politicians lie or that the great things he’s doing for the country are more important than whether he lies a lot? I don’t claim to know, but I invite the Trump defenders who sometimes comment under my posts to share their views on it. Seriously, I respect those who disagree with my own policy preferences, most of which are in disagreement with Trump’s, and agree with his. But I’m looking for help on how his supporters deal with the constant lying.
Here’s a link directly to that I-never-said-the-things-I-said video from when it first ran.
