Donald Trump has increased his projection of the death toll in the United States of America to 100,000. This is perhaps the only fairly reasonable statement that he has made over the past three months. And yet he was incredibly delusory when he remarked recently, “It’s going to go. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone.”
He could well have added a supplementary ~ Neither America nor the world are going to be the same again. By the contrived yardstick of wishful thinking, there isn’t a parallel in the world today, such as it is. There was no indication of sarcasm as when he prescribed a “disinfectant injection”.
There is little doubt in America today that his appalling performance has eventually taken a toll on his popularity stakes. Misgivings that the death toll could get much worse thanks to a President who is more concerned about re-election rather than the welfare of citizens are dangerously real. Six months before the first vote is cast in November, his credibility has plummeted almost irreparably.
Not to put too fine a point on it, he has made a spectacle of himself in the perception of the voters, cutting across party lines. The nub of the matter must be that Americans are suffering. Will he? This is the uppermost question in the country today, however much the President tries to effect an “economic recovery” in parallel to his horrifyingly exponential foreboding on the casualty toll, if Sunday’s presentation at the Lincoln Memorial is any indication.
It is bound to resonate in the echo chambers of the Great Hall of the People in China and the World Health Organization. It was an echo too of the prediction in February that “It’s going to disappear” ~ a belief that he iterated repeatedly as the fatalities rose. Since that forecast, a million Americans have fallen ill with coronavirus ~ almost a third of the global total ~ and more than 60,000 have died, in just a few weeks surpassing the US death toll during the Vietnam war.
Is President Trump engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief? Suffice it to register that the scenario in the world’s oldest democracy is more frightful than a nightmare, to say the least. The best that can be said for Mr Trump’s election-driven wishful thinking is that it is less immediately dangerous than his recent public musings that people might have injections of disinfectant as a cure.
Each week of the pandemic has brought new shame upon the President: he failed to equip his country and its health workers, to advocate physical distancing when it was desperately needed, or even to look like he was seriously concerned about the outbreak and its victims, preferring instead to boast about the ratings.
The United States of America is in crisis. But does the President really care? This just about sums up the tragedy of the nation which in Donald Trump’s projection is poised to be poorer by 100,000 citizens.