Donald Trump and his toadies love calling the coronavirus the “Wuhan Virus” or the “Chinese Virus.” The sad fact remains that foreign ministers of the G7 countries failed to agree on a joint statement on the pandemic, in part, because the Trump administration insisted on calling it the “Wuhan virus.”
I suggest it’s about time we start calling the coronavirus, or COVID-19, “The Trump Virus.”
Am I being unfair? Too harsh? Is it too early to go there? Should we just leave all this to the history books?
Let’s get one thing straight … Donald Trump is not responsible for the coronavirus. He did not cause it to become a global pandemic.
But Trump’s actions, or inactions, did make the situation in the United States much worse than it needed to be. A Boston Globe editorial even went so far as to say, “Much of the suffering and death coming was predictable. The president has blood on his hands,”
David Frum recently wrote in The Atlantic:
That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the pre-crisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
Frum did not stop there:
The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.
Trump needs to forever be linked to what he has wrought … “The Trump Virus.”
In his “fight” against the coronavirus, Trump has likened himself to a “wartime president.” Unfortunately for the United States, and the world, we have been saddled with the worst possible leader at the worst possible time.
To paraphrase an old Donald Rumsfeld quote, “You go to war with the president you have, not the president you might want.” God help us.
November 3, 2020 can’t come soon enough.
Photo | politico.com