Forenregeln » Makes No Mention of Virus's Toll

As President Donald Trump’s motorcade pulled into his golf club in Virginia on an overcast Sunday, a small group of protesters waited outside the entrance. One held up a sign.

“I care do U? ” it read. “100, 000 dead. ”

Trump and his advisers have said that he does, but he has made scant effort to demonstrate it this Memorial Day weekend. He finally ordered flags lowered to half-staff at the White House only after being badgered to do so by his critics and otherwise took no public notice as the American death toll from the coronavirus pandemic approached a staggering 100, 000.

While the country neared six digits of death, the president who repeatedly criticized his predecessor for golfing during a crisis spent the weekend on the links for the first time since March. When he was not zipping around on a cart, he was on social media embracing fringe conspiracy theories, amplifying messages from a racist and sexist Twitter account and lobbing playground insults at perceived enemies, including his own former attorney general.

This was a death toll that Trump once predicted would never be reached. In late February, he said there were only 15 coronavirus cases in the United States, understating even then the actual number, and declared that “the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. ” In the annals of the American presidency, it would be hard to recall a more catastrophically wrong prediction. Even after he later acknowledged that it would not be zero, he insisted the death toll would fall “substantially below the 100, 000” mark.

As it stands now, the coronavirus has infected 1. 6 million and taken so many lives it is as if an entire midsize American city — say Boca Raton, Florida, just to pick an example — simply disappeared. The toll is about to match the 100, 000 killed in the United States by the pandemic of 1968 and is closing in on the outbreak of 1957-58, which killed 116, 000. At this pace, it will stand as the country’s deadliest public health disaster since the great influenza of 1918-20 — all at the same time the nation confronts the most severe economic collapse since the Great Depression.






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