On March 13th, the day he proclaimed a national emergency, Trump asserted "I don't take responsibility at all" for his wishful thinking and months-long abdication of responsibility. Accelerating his campaign to avoid blame for what had become the "Trump virus," on March 16th Trump issued his first tweet in which he called the coronavirus the "Chinese virus." It has become his go-to excuse.
Yet, according to Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Trump made "at least 37 different statements"in January, February, March and April praising the Chinese government and defending the performance of General Xi."
Trump also has attempted to escape responsibility for America's nightmare by blaming President Obama for various imaginary offenses; most notably, on April 30, 2020, for "leaving him with faulty tests for coronavirus infections. 'The last administration left us nothing,' Trump said. 'We started off with bad, broken tests and obsolete tests.'
But Obama left office in 2017 and COVID-19 didn't exist until last year, as CNN'sJim Acosta was quick to point out to the president.
'You say 'broken tests,' Acosta said. 'It's a new virus, so how could the tests be broken?'" Ed Mazza, Trump Called Out To His Face After Blaming Obama For 'Broken' Coronavirus Tests, Huffington Post, May 1, 2020)
Soon thereafter, Trump began blaming America's increased testing for the spike in coronavirus cases. As Jane C. Timm wrote for NBC News on June 10, 2020, "President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed testing as the reason for documented spikes in the number of COVID-19 cases across the U.S. - but data and public health experts attribute the surge to the easing of lockdown restriction just weeks ago.
'By the way, when you do more testing, you have more cases. We have more cases than anybody because we do more testing than anybody. It's pretty simple,' Trump said Friday in the White House Rose Garden."
In fact, Trump has even asserted, "when you test, you create cases. So we've created cases." That's as stupid as saying, "When you test for pregnancies, you create pregnancies."
We are not dealing with quantum mechanics here. When you test, you "identify," you do not "create." Undoubtedly there are many more cases out there than have been identified by tests. Specifically, as the New York Times reported on July 22, 2020, "The average number of tests conducted nationwide has grown by 80 percent since early June, to 780,000 per day. Daily case counts have grown by 215 percent in the same period."
As of August 9, 2020, the United States had suffered almost 5 million cases of the coronavirus and more than 160,000 deaths from that virus. By a shamefully large margin, the U. S. numbers are the "greatest" in the world. While the U. S. makes up but 4.27 percent of the world's population, it has suffered some 22% of the world's total coronavirus cases and deaths. Perhaps this is Trump's perverse way of carrying out his promise to "Make America Great Again."
As Heather Long properly concludes, "The coronavirus and botched government response have thrown the economy into the deepest crisis since the Great Depression," (Heather Long, The U.S. economy is on the verge of a 'lost year,' Washington Post, August 7, 2020). The GDP for the second quarter of 2020 "collapsed at a 32.9% annualized rate "the deepest decline in output since the government started keeping records in 1947," (Reuters, COVID-19 Crushes U.S. Economy in Second Quarter; Rising Virus Cases Loom Over Recovery, New York Times, July 30, 2020).According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for July 2020 was 10.2%. As Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart write in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, "Most analyses project that the U.S. unemployment rate will remain near the double-digit mark through the middle of next year" ("The Pandemic Depression: The Global Economy Will Never Be the Same"). They caution against confusing any temporary rebound, which the Trump administration will hype, with a recovery.
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