President Donald Trump’s new push to open schools shows he’s learned nothing from calamities sparked by his demands for premature state openings.
The coronavirus pandemic is again rearing out of control, rising in a majority of states as a new warning comes that more than 200,000 Americans could be dead by Election Day.
But Trump barreled forward anyway, failing to offer detailed proposals for how schools could open safely next month even as he admitted he planned to crank up pressure on governors to do what he wants.
He also delivered a fresh rebuke to his government’s top infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had dismissed the President’s discredited claims that the US has the world’s lowest mortality rate.
And Trump conjured another wishful prediction: that the worsening battle against the virus, which has already killed 130,000 Americans and infected 3 million, would be far less serious within weeks.
Schools: Trump’s self-serving implication that his opponents want to keep schools closed to hurt him politically ignores the complicated concerns that administrators, teachers and parents harbor over the prospect of schools staying closed — and the dangers that are inherent in getting classes up and running again.
Economy: The US economy is now threatened by a second slump if the virus gets so bad that states and cities are forced back into lockdown. Trump’s administration falls short on all those key strategies and even now is ignoring best practices and the evidence of what worked elsewhere in a bid to crank up the economy, deemed vital to the President’s reelection hopes.
