US Trails Its Peers In Fighting The Virus

The disaster in the US is perhaps best expressed in comparison to other industrialized nations. States such as South Korea suffocated the virus with aggressive measures while Trump was still denying its threat. France and Italy suffered terribly, but science-based lockdowns kept in place until the pathogen was suppressed -- unlike the premature state openings demanded by Trump -- worked. 

Aggressive foreign governments from Australia to Hong Kong to Germany now pounce on outbreaks in a bid to forestall a major resurgence.

France, with a population of 67 million, reported 534 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday and 18 new deaths. Florida, where 21 million live, put up 13,965 new cases and a new record of 156 deaths on a day its pro-Trump Gov. Ron DeSantis blamed the media for the virus running out of control.

Another Trump acolyte, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, issued an executive order late Wednesday blocking the Peach State's cities from issuing orders requiring masks to be worn in public places -- a measure proven to decrease virus transmission -- and on Thursday sued Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms for sticking by her city's mask order.

"How can you not shake your head, right? Over 3 million cases, over 135,000 deaths, preventable deaths here in the United States," said Dr. Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center on CNN's "New Day" Thursday. "And we are the one outlier amongst all of our peer countries. All of Europe has contained their disease. And many parts of the world, not only have they contained, they've eliminated disease."

The President, however, turned his gaze away from this worsening calamity and international embarrassment. He rarely mentions the virus in public, unless it is to deny its awful reality. The President never appears with his public health officials and gives every impression that he has moved on. On Thursday, he gathered Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers in the White House to celebrate the eradication of more "job killing regulations."

"We made it so dishwashers now have a lot more water and in many places -- in most places of the country, water's not a problem, they don't know what to do with it. It's called rain. They don't have a problem," Trump said, at an event in which various guests were called to the microphone by a genuflecting Vice President Mike Pence to pay tribute to his "leadership."

Trump's event came a day after he flew to Atlanta, one of the spiking coronavirus hotspots, not for emergency brainstorming sessions at the conveniently situated US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but for an event on transportation projects.

With the country on its knees because of the virus, which is now rising in 39 states, the White House is filling Trump's day with the kind of low wattage, incremental events meant to highlight an agenda typical of times when Presidents run out of political clout.

"He's doing a lot of things at once," she said. "That's the great thing about the Trump administration," McEnany said.

While ignoring the worsening national crisis, Trump has also found time to shake-up his reelection campaign, as the former chief, Brad Parscale, paid the price for the debacle and low crowd at what was supposed to be the President's triumphant return to the campaign trail in Oklahoma.

Despite the frantic remodeling less than four months before election day, Trump claimed that opinion polls showing him trailing Democratic presumptive nominee Joe Biden by double digits were all fiction. While refusing to take the pandemic seriously, Trump turned the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office into a market stall for Goya products, after the firm's CEO faced a backlash for praising him. His daughter Ivanka showed her political tin ear by launching a program that urges millions of people who lost jobs in the pandemic their father ignored to "find something new."