Reality bites Donald Trump
As we near the final 100 hours of the campaign, President Trump finds himself facing a foe more formidable than Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment: Trump is running against reality. And reality is winning. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently had to walk back a statement that “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” was an achievement of the Trump administration — a mind-boggling assertion at time when infection rates are rising in most states, more than 43,000 people have been hospitalized over a seven-day period and more than 900 people are dying from the disease every day.
That matches Trump’s frantic and false assertion at the presidential debate that the nation is “rounding the corner” on the pandemic.
Consider the president’s preposterous claim on Twitter that “we have made tremendous progress with the China Virus, but the Fake News refuses to talk about it this close to the Election. COVID, COVID, COVID is being used by them, in total coordination, in order to change our great early election numbers. Should be an election law violation!”
It would be laughable — were it not so tragically serious — that the president is pretending that the news media has conspired to deprive the public of information about the pandemic purely to hurt Trump’s re-election chances.
As a practical matter, Trump’s conspiracy theory dissolves at the local level, where hospitals are being stretched to the breaking point and public health officials are scrambling to keep everyone safe. Contrary to the president’s smears, local news organizations are performing heroically, bringing vital information to people as the virus continues to spread.
In Wisconsin, where cases are exploding too fast for contact tracers to keep up, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — a hometown paper with no ideological ax to grind about COVID — reported an expression of alarm from the Republican speaker of the state assembly, Robin Vos.
“First, we need to take politics out of it and work together to fight the virus,” Vos told the paper earlier this week. “Obviously, what we’re doing now as a state isn’t working.”
The paper also reported on a public exhibit of 600 empty black, folding chairs arrayed in a public square by civic groups, with each seat representing one of the 600 people who have died in the county so far.
Multiply that by the thousands of counties affected by COVID, and Trump’s paranoid tweet begins to look grotesquely ineffectual.
The Indianapolis Star reports that Indiana’s availability of ICU beds has dipped below 30% as cases mount to the highest levels since April.
In Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune quotes the state’s Republican governor, Gary Herbert, warning that “our hospitals are starting to fill up,” a situation that “should cause us all alarm.”
Kentucky’s KYU-FM notes that more than half the state’s hospital beds are filled and a record high number of cases continues to rise.
And so on. Trump can continue to insist that all these reports are fake, but people know better. It’s heartbreaking to see other places relive the horror we experienced in New York last spring: the sirens wailing through the night, the bodies stored in overflowing morgues, the exhausted and overworked hospital workers.
It will take more than a few Fox News-fortified falsehoods to erase those images from voters’ minds.
A second break from reality that Trump is trying to sell involves the ongoing national reckoning with matters of race and policing. Here again, it’s Trump vs reality, and the real world is winning.
For months, Trump has been using his campaign platforms to combat the broad national movement to confront racial inequality, often promoted as “Black Lives Matter,” a slogan Trump has denounced as “a symbol of hate.”
The issue takes on special meaning in Philadelphia, the largest city in swing-state Pennsylvania, where nightly protests are taking place in the wake of the police killing of a black man named Walter Wallace who reportedly had mental health problems.
Cops and protesters have been clashing in the streets and looting has taken place, a level of disorder that nobody wants.
But polls show that two-thirds of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter movement at the height of national protests last summer, a number that has since dropped but still represented a majority of Americans as of September.
Voters clearly understand that policing has long been biased and has resulted in the tragic deaths of people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude and others, many suffering from mental or emotional distress.
Trump’s response to this national awakening, a ham-handed call for “law and order, ignores a raft of reforms taking place in cities and statehouses around the country.
The president’s ignorance marks him, once again, as a candidate out of touch with the major stories likely to shape the outcome of the election.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.
Check the stats
To Voicer Bill Barrett: Regarding your questioning of the Daily News editorial claiming NYC is safer now than it was under Rudy Giuliani, that is indeed true. The seven major crimes, most of which you mentioned, decreased from 430,000 to 162,000 under Giuliani. They continued to decrease to 113,000 under Bloomberg, and as of 2019 continued to decrease under de Blasio to 95,000. While we have had an increase in 2020, it is nowhere near past levels. So before you accuse the paper of lying, please check your info. So tired of NYC being categorized as the capital of crime in this country. Carol Webb
Great article about the plight of NYC EMS workers (“Fund is lifeline for lifesavers,” Oct. 28). I didn’t realize how grossly underpaid they are. I will be donating to the FDNY EMS Help Fund. The FDNY should do a better job of letting New Yorkers know about this worthwhile cause. Francis Danner
Metsbuster
Manhattan: Dear Mr. Mayor, the city is in the midst of a pandemic, loss of life and utter homelessness, yet your main priority is screwing the Mets purchase? You destroyed my city and now you want to destroy my team? Get off your Julius Caesar act and do the right thing. It’s beyond shameful.