Good news is hard to find for Trump
OAMHINGTON >> President Trump has failed America on the most pressing issues facing our country and its people.
He has, first and foremost, failed to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, refusing to adequately address a deadly illness that still threatens the lives of millions of Americans.
When the virus first struck the U.S., Trump casually dismissed the threat, saying it would miraculously disappear in a short time.
He refused to wear a face mask whenever he went before crowds of voters, even though medical experts said it was the most effective defense against the deadly disease.
When he, the first lady and others in his family, along with members of his staff, were infected by the virus, people thought that might change his mind and his approach. But it didn’t. He ended up in the hospital for treatment before bouncing back as active, eager and motivated as ever.
Yet he found a thorny thicket of problems awaited him as soon as he returned to the West Wing.
According to the U.S. Labor Department, over 64 million American citizens have filed first-time unemployment claims since the pandemic began in this country in March, including another 898,000 last week.
A Pew Research Center survey finds that, overall, 1 in 4 adults have had trouble paying their bills since the coronavirus outbreak hit the U.S., and about one-third of those surveyed have had to dip into their savings or retirement accounts to make ends meet.
About 1 in 6 adults told Pew that they have had to borrow money from friends or family or received food from a food bank. And 25 percent of adults said they or someone in their household had been laid off or lost their job as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
Mom-and-pop shops have had to close their businesses, along with chain stores employing thousands across the country. The overall unemployment rate for September fell to 7.9 percent, down from 8.4 percent in August, the Labor Department reported last week, though the U.S. labor force’s growth in the current 10-year period is projected to be smaller than in the previous 10-year period between 2002 and 2012.
Meantime, the total number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. was approaching 8 million this week, with the lives of 217,000 Americans already lost, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“America’s doctor,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious disease, has long been warning us to “hunker down significantly more than we as a country are doing.”
Trump has often angrily disagreed with him, even tweeting months ago that “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
At the time, the president was rejecting social distancing and masks, and urging businesses and bars to reopen and promoting huge rallies in support of his reelection.
Six months on, his message remains much the same.
The gruesome result has been a viral explosion of needless deaths.