It’s too late now for Trump to mask his failings as president
AFTER five months, 144,000 deaths and four million people infected with Covid-19, President Donald Trump this week came to a sudden realisation. America’s self-proclaimed “stable genius” appeared to begin to grasp the enormity of the coronavirus situation.
On Monday, Trump made a quite incredible reversal when he tweeted ‘...many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance’.
It came after months of refusing to wear a mask himself, while mocking those – including Democratic rival Joe Biden – who did.
He also vowed to bring back his calamitous daily coronavirus briefings, at one of which he famously suggested injecting disinfectant into Covid carriers to cure them.
The apparent about turn came following months of Trump and his cronies repeatedly attacking and undermining Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert, and at a time when Covid-19 cases are surging and the death toll continues to soar, despite it still being only the first wave.
Throughout his time in the Oval Office, Trump has repeatedly proven that he does nothing without there being some benefit in it for himself.
It is why, ever since January when the virus reached America’s shores, rather than act for the good of the country and the world, he has chosen to politicise the pandemic.
First he denied its very existence. Then he explicitly disavowed all responsibility for the carnage it wrought. He then went on to blame others for his own disastrous failures, while referring to himself a “wartime president”.
Worse still, he drove a movement that sees millions refuse to cover their faces in public, claiming it would be an infringement on their rights if they were forced to do so.
President Donald Trump wearing a face mask
Ever since the outbreak began, the master of distraction and misdirection has done everything in his power to distract and misdirect.
That includes his abhorrent handling of the death of a black man, George Floyd, at the hands of white cops and more recently the occupation of US cities by his federal troops. This week Trump seized on the disorder in Portland to deflect attention from the pandemic, yet again, and to exploit the country’s deepening divisions which serve his political purposes so well.
But time is running out, and increasingly, many of those who helped him to the White House are turning on him. In 2016, Trump was an unknown quantity. The American public knew only of his TV persona. The hotshot businessman who appeared to have the Midas touch.
Four years on, they have had front-row seats to the real Trump.
Five months into the worst domestic crisis since the Second World War, and following his disastrous call to re-open states, the president understands his pandemic performance will be decisive in November’s election.
It is why he is desperate to restart his daily briefings.
With campaign rallies now gone, it is the only way he can talk directly to the American public.
The briefings will afford Trump the return to television screens he craves, but the damage has already been done.
He has failed in his duty to help Americans during Covid and highlighted the dismal state of his leadership abilities.
Trump is a flailing demagogue who sees his grip on power slipping away.
It is time for Americans undo the mistake they made in 2016 and end this failed presidency.