(CNN)Most Presidents would try to stop the United States from barreling toward disaster. But Donald Trump has nothing to say and no answers to mitigate a calamity unfolding on his watch that he seems resolved to ignore.
On the day when the government’s top infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci said he would not be surprised to see the US record 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day, Trump refused to break his deafening silence.
And the day after his White House described record-breaking new infections that are sweeping the nation as “embers that need to be put out,” Trump’s campaign claimed credit for the “phenomenal” success of his botched pandemic leadership.
Trump is now pretty much the sole figure in authority in either party — including his major Republican allies — who refuse to wear or endorse face masks that are proven to slow the spread of coronavirus but that he has stigmatized as a liberal plot to harm him politically.”We must have no stigma, none, about wearing masks when we leave our homes and come near other people. Wearing simple face coverings is not about protecting ourselves, it is about protecting everyone we encounter,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor Monday.
But Trump on Tuesday tweeted cryptically “THE LONE WARRIOR!” — apparently embracing his isolation from even political allies and the scientific approaches that have proven elsewhere to at least slow the spread of the coronavirus in the short term.
Undeterred by the deepening national crisis, Trump is pressing ahead with plans for an early July Fourth celebration at Mount Rushmore that will bracket him symbolically and without irony alongside four of America’s most revered Presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. The social distancing advised by Trump’s government will not be enforced.
The White House did hold a briefing on Wednesday, but it appeared to be a premeditated attempt by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to fog the water around another drama rocking Trump — claims that he did nothing about a Russian military intelligence scheme to put a bounty on the heads of US troops in Afghanistan. McEnany left the briefing room before she could be questioned about the pandemic.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, whose current wide lead in most general election polls can be explained partly by Trump’s performance during the pandemic, pounced on the latest grave developments to lambast the President.
Seizing on Trump’s remark in April that he was now a “wartime President,” Biden adopted a tone of scathing mockery.
“What happened? Now it’s almost July, and it seems like our wartime president has surrendered — waved the white flag and left the battlefield,” the Democrat said in a speech in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
In the vacuum left by resolute guidance that only the person in the Oval Office can provide, the coronavirus is quickening its deadly march across the country, with 36 states now seeing rising cases, and at least 16 slowing the reopening plans championed by the President while hospital emergency rooms see increasing admissions that suggest a fast rising death toll could be only days away.
Far from the four Presidents whose images he will survey in North Dakota, Trump’s perverse failure to crank up a federal government effort to fight a worsening pandemic over which he has said the US has “prevailed” is beginning to resemble Herbert Hoover’s indifference during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
