As the pandemic rages, Trump indulges his obsessions

USA With the pandemic exploding and setting record infection rates, President Donald Trump spent the weekend on his own often divisive obsessions, piling up new evidence for detractors who say he’s not fit for office.

The President largely ignored the implications of the disastrous US government response to the worst public health crisis in 100 years, even though it emerged late on Friday in CNN reporting that the White House is taking vigorous efforts to protect him from infection at rallies that contravene social distancing and masking guidelines, and that put even his own supporters at risk of getting sick.

Trump did, however, find time to defend a statue of former President Andrew Jackson, who retired to his slave plantation in 1837, and to retweet a video in which a supporter chanted “white power.” Trump denied reports that he was briefed that Russia offered a bounty for the killings of US and UK soldiers by the Taliban but didn’t say how he would respond and stand up for

American troops if the story was true. And Trump, who lambasted his predecessor Barack Obama for his less prolific golf hobby, made two trips to his Virginia course, despite boasting that he canceled a weekend trip to his New Jersey resort to make sure “law and order is enforced” in Washington, DC.

Trump’s weekend represented yet another sign that he has moved on from a pandemic, which has killed more than 125,000 Americans and threatens to claim tens of thousands more, that he initially ignored, then mismanaged and politicized and has now has grown tired of talking about as his reelection fight looms. His negligence came despite his Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar delivering an alarming warning on CNN that appeared to contradict Vice President Mike Pence’s claim of “truly remarkable progress” in the battle against coronavirus and false statements that the US had “flattened the curve.”

(CNN)