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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYes, this is all Trump's fault; David Frum counts the ways
Trump now fancies himself a wartime president. How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a very good job if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.
That the pandemic occurred is not Trumps fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trumps fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trumps fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trumps fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trumps fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trumps fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trumps fault too.
The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trumps fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trumps fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trumps fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the viruss threat to his crew? Trumps fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trumps fault. The insertion of Trumps arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trumps fault.
It didnt have to be this way. If somebody else had been president of the United States in December 2019Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody elsethe United States would still have been afflicted by the coronavirus. But it would have been better prepared, and better able to respond.Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/7/1935283/-Yes-this-is-all-Trump-s-fault-David-Frum-for-the-Atlantic?detail=emaildkre