It seems impossible to keep up with the impeached Donald Trump's endless stream of scandals, failures, and outrages. But this is one on which the media should remain focused. Today, the acknowledged Covid-19 death toll in the United States hit 100,000. But this was the impeached Trump exactly three months ago:
Minutes before President Trump was preparing Wednesday to reassure a skittish nation about the coronavirus threat, he received a piece of crucial information: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified in California the first U.S. case of the illness not tied to foreign travel, a sign that the virus’s spread in the United States was likely to explode.
But when Trump took to the lectern for a news conference intended to bring transparency to the spiraling global crisis, he made no explicit mention of the California case and its implications — and falsely suggested the virus might soon be eradicated in the United States.
“And again, when you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero — that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” he said.
Of course, his own intelligence briefing book had by then repeatedly warned of the potential crisis. And his administration had been receiving warnings as far back as November. But Trump has never listened to intelligence agencies, unless they were Russian. And intelligence has never been his strong point, to begin with.
Trump's failures have cost tens of thousands of lives. That's the story. That should be the primary political narrative about this historic crisis. Trump kills.