Looking past 60K deaths: Trump still refusing to come to terms with reality

The first of May is here and the President of the United States, Donald Trump, is hell-bent on sticking with his date on opening up the country to back to where it was prior to the deadly pandemic taking an ugly toll.

Throwing to wind all cautions called by health experts, the President is planning to travel to Arizona and Ohio in the very near future to enjoy what he has missed for the last four weeks by way of noisy and boisterous rallies. Trump and his close circle of advisors including son-in-law Jared Kushner say that he has been “cooped up” for far too long inside the White House even if that was the smartest thing he has done till date.

And left to the President and his small band of cronies, coronavirus and its devastating impact on America is itself the figment of the imagination of the left-wing media and Democrats.

The ground reality in America could not be farther than reality: in a span of just twelve weeks, the death toll across fifty states has topped 60,000; and more than one million people have been infected. People have started drawing comparisons between the coronavirus toll and the last time the United States had to see such a massive amount of people consigned to dust. Some 58,220 soldiers died in the course of the Vietnam War over a 16 year period in a conflict that raged through at least six Presidents.

Related news: Trump says will resume travelling next week

The Pentagon Papers would show that while successive Presidents fancied on America “winning” an unwinnable war in Indo-China, none of them were in denial of the toll that it was taking on the country, economically and in terms of the body bags that were coming home on a daily basis since 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war through the bogus Tonkin Gulf Resolution saying that North Vietnamese Patrol Boats had attacked American warships, the USS Turner Joy and the USS Maddox—a confrontation that later investigation revealed did not take place at all!

Trump is undoubtedly in denial, first in failing to come to terms that the virus has taken a terrible toll in human lives; and now health experts within the administration and outside are making the point that some 74,000 lives would be lost by the first week of August, based on current trends. And there is no telling of the death toll if the administration openly defies and goads like-minded allies in the States to discard advisories of social distancing and gradual opening up of sectors.

The President, who is his own advisor-in-chief, seems to mockingly look at the toll as if to say: They said some 2 million people would die; and at 60,000 I must be doing something good! Plus Trump is very good when it comes to blaming others if the going gets tough. “Many very good experts, very good people too, said this would never affect the United States. The experts got it wrong. A lot of people got it wrong and a lot of people didn’t know it would be this serious”, Trump recently remarked.

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The media in America has been quick to point out that had only Trump listened to what was being said, things would have been different. At least 12 times since January, The Washington Post has maintained, the Central Intelligence Agency through the President’s Daily Brief—a For Your Eyes Only Report that reaches the White House early every morning– had told Trump of the pandemic and its implications to America. And if the Republican President had scoffed it all, that should not come as a major surprise—Trump has nothing but contempt for his intelligence agencies because many of them held the view that the Russians meddled in the 2016 elections to the disadvantage of Hillary Clinton. But for a person who despises to hear Russia intervened in his favor, he has already set the stage by saying that China very much wants to see Democratic opponent Joseph Biden in the Oval Office in 2021. From calling his opponent “Sleepy Joe”, it is now “Beijing Biden”!

In a recent interview the President said, “China will do anything they can to have me lose this race”—setting the stage for a nice but acrimonious face-saver in the end. Seen in one perspective President Trump is seeing his future unraveling right before his eyes. The man is not politically stupid by any stretch of imagination. He is just not the genius that he makes himself out to be. In a very short span of time Trump is seeing the 2020 election victory getting more and more elusive in spite of all the spin that is being put around it. Some four months ago the turnaround of the economy was his chief weapon that could be used against any Democrat—Biden, Bernie Sanders or anyone.

Today the administration is looking at some 27 million Americans signing up for unemployment benefits and with the economy showing a negative growth rate of 4.8 per cent. The American economy is said to be the worst since the Great Depression. No wonder Trump is so livid that even some of his close advisors look at his outrageous statements on disinfectants-for-coronavirus as someone who is so distracted to the point of “losing it”.

White House staffers and advisors are not the only ones running for cover or staying out of sight of the President these days. Heading this list will be all those in the re-election team of Trump who apparently have already started “getting it” from the commander-in-chief, particularly his campaign manager Brad Parscale.

According to CNN faced with damaging poll numbers, Trump lit into Parscale very recently going to the point of even threatening to sue him. A raft of national and state polls are showing Biden with a comfortable lead over Trump especially in must-win states like Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Further what must have really irritated the Republican incumbent is that the latest USA Today/ Suffolk University Poll shows Biden leading Trump by six points; and by ten points if there is no third-party contender.

Related news: 35 US states release formal opening plans, Trump says better days ahead

Even at this stage of the election process, a credible candidate of any party will look at the polling statistics to see what remedial steps are to be taken to get out of the morass. But here we are talking of a person who has his own notions of politics and the political process; and Trump has taken the route of questioning poll numbers, including internal polling. By this, he is only setting the stage for “yes persons” to manipulate the numbers so as to tell the President what he wants to hear and in the process lead him down a path he very much abhors.

(The writer was a former senior journalist in Washington D.C. covering North America and the United Nations.)