By Dana Milbank
WASHINGTON -- This is the time for presidential candidates to make their closing arguments, but Joe Biden didn't really have to.
President Donald Trump did it for him.
"The Fake News Media is riding COVID, COVID, COVID, all the way to the Election. Losers!" he tweeted.
"Covid, covid, covid, covid," he said in Nebraska.
"Covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid," he said in North Carolina.
"Covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid!" he railed in Michigan
It was as presidential as Jan Brady crying "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia."
Trump was doubling down - actually, tripling, quadrupling, sextupling and decupling down - on the very thing costing him the election: his incompetent and inhumane handling of the greatest mass trauma in living memory for the vast majority of Americans.
- His callous disregard for at least 228,000 Americans dead from the virus (they apparently ignored him when he said, "Don't let it dominate your life") and the millions out of work.
- His ridicule of the media, Democrats and the public for paying attention to the pandemic at a time when a record number of Americans (nearly 90,000 Thursday) are getting infected, and 1,000 are dying, daily. "It is what it is."
- His incessant lies about "rounding the corner" on the virus, which is "ending," even as cases rise in 42 states and overwhelmed hospitals consider rationing.
- His let-them-eat-cake attitude that Americans shouldn't fear the virus, when he had a squadron of top doctors spending a fortune in taxpayer money to give him advanced and experimental treatments nobody else can get.
- His contempt for science and masks, his rushed reopening, and his crackpot remedies that led to worst-in-the-world fatalities in the United States.
Trump is unfit for the office he holds, and it was good of him to encapsulate so succinctly why he must be replaced with a leader of competence and compassion: Covid, covid, covid!
We needn't look back over the past four years - joblessness, debt, racial strife and international disdain - to see why Trump is unfit. We need only look back at the past two weeks.
- He returned to calling immigrants "rapists" and "murderers" and referred to "Barack Hussein Obama."
- He mockingly mispronounced Kamala Harris's name and used the racist trope of labeling the African American Democratic vice-presidential nominee "angry."
- His senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, proposed that Black Americans don't "want to be successful."
- Trump's campaign, after a rally in frigid Omaha, stranded supporters for hours, landing some in the hospital.
- Judge-appointed lawyers said they couldn't find the parents of 545 migrant children the Trump administration separated from their parents.
- Trump embraced a "lock her up" chant directed at the Michigan governor, target of a kidnapping plot.
- Covid-19 relief talks collapsed after the Senate Republican leader told the White House not to make a deal.
- A federal judge struck down Trump's plan to slash food stamps for 700,000 unemployed Americans.
- Stocks plunged toward their worst monthly drop since March as pandemic fears outweighed strong third-quarter growth.
- Trump opened 9.3 million pristine acres of rainforest in Alaska to logging and development.
- A Trump political appointee resigned in protest because a new presidential order destroys the integrity of the civil service.
- Trump promoted dubious allegations against Biden that news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, said could not be corroborated by the evidence.
- Trump told women in Michigan that "we're getting your husbands back to work."
- And he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Israel's prime minister to join him in ridiculing "Sleepy Joe."
Meanwhile, news broke that:
- Trump's administration ousted the top scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after he reminded Trump appointees not to manipulate scientific findings.
- The U.S. Postal Service's on-time delivery dropped below 60% in swing states after a Trump ally sabotaged operations.
- Trump's businesses have received at least $8.1 million from taxpayers and supporters since he took office.
- Creditors forgave some $270 million of his unpaid debts related to a Chicago building project a decade ago.
But leading the latest parade of horribles has been pandemic ineptitude: the White House issuing a report taking credit for "ending the covid-19 pandemic," Trump's claiming we're "rounding the turn" even as his chief of staff says "we are not going to control the pandemic," and Vice President Pence campaigning despite an outbreak among his staff.
The White House justified Pence's recklessness by saying he "has the best doctors in the world around him." The hell with those he might infect.
The millions who have lost friends and loved ones, lost jobs, lost a year of their lives in the unmet hope that the government would do its job? Go tell Biden. It's just nuisance noise to Trump.
Covid, covid, covid. |
