From the moment Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in June 2015, I’ve been a Never Trumper.
That was because he’d spent zero minutes of his life as a public servant — and virtually every minute of his life engaged in narcissistic self-promotion. He started out slapping his name onto skyscrapers and casinos, and then less grandly, he moved onto vodka, mattresses, dog collars, and fake universities. His business record was a chaotic saga of betrayed partners, conned customers, harmed shareholders, a string of bankruptcies, and then that long second-act pivot to reality TV.
What price would America pay if we elected a gameshow host as our president?
Four years later, the costs of Trump compound on a daily basis. In the face of a complex health crisis that requires focused and informed leadership, we’ve got a guy who, as Saturday Night Live recently put it, made hoping for a miracle his Plan A.
Initially, Trump bet big on his hunch that coronavirus would just magically disappear. When that didn’t happen, he started hyping get-well-quick schemes with the same conviction he once applied to Trump University seminars and mail-order meat in a box.
When new case confirmations and deaths kept climbing, he proposed cleaning internal organs with one-minute disinfectant injections that could do a “tremendous number on the lungs.” Even his loyal friends at Fox News weren’t ready to swallow that Kool-Aid.
Thanks to Trump’s indifference, failure to act quickly, and poor decision-making, he has made a bad situation cataclysmically worse.
On January 20th, both the United States and South Korea reported their first coronavirus case. In mid-March, as the Atlantic notes, “the U.S. and South Korea had the same number of coronavirus-caused fatalities — approximately 90.” As of May 9th, 2020, South Korea had 10,840 confirmed cases and 256 confirmed fatalities. (Click here for latest totals.) On the same date, the U.S. had 1.32 million confirmed cases and 78,327 deaths. (Click here for latest totals.)
More than 33.5 million people have filed for unemployment. Millions may end up losing their businesses for good. Our government and the corporate sectors have added trillions of dollars of debt to their ledgers. Fast and reliable…
