In March, Donald Trump referred to himself as a wartime president. How is the war going? We just passed 100,000 dead from COVID-19. A month ago, we passed Vietnam’s death toll of 58,209. Since then, we’ve added the death toll of Korea (36,574), Iraq (4,576) and the 2,216 dead from Afghanistan.
We, under Trump’s complete failure to provide anything other than false platitudes to prop up the stock market, quack “cures” and outright lies, are now 25% of the way to the death toll of World War II.
To be fair, Trump didn’t create COVID-19, but his actions and his inactions have made the death toll much worse.
A study published in the New York Times in April concluded that had Trump acted just two weeks earlier up to 90% of deaths from COVID-19 could have been avoided. Trump cried “fake news.”
It isn’t fake news. All you have to do is look at the death toll from any nation that took COVID-19 seriously. Countries like our World War II enemies Germany and Japan. Germany has one-quarter of our population and 8,430 COVID-19 dead. Japan has one-third our population and 862 dead. They did this using social distancing, contact tracing and testing. Things we have failed to do to any great extent. As such, the U.S. is seeing a surge in cases while the countries that responded effectively are starting to safely reopen.
FDR was a wartime president who inspired a nation; Donald Trump suggested ingesting bleach.
ERIC WEINER
Concord