Most Presidents would try to stop the United States from barreling toward disaster. But
Donald Trump has nothing to say and no answers to mitigate a calamity unfolding on his watch that he seems resolved to ignore.
On the day when the government's top infectious disease specialist
Anthony Fauci said he would not be surprised to see the US record
100,000 new coronavirus cases per day, Trump refused to break his deafening silence.
And the day after his White House described record-breaking
new infections that are sweeping the nation as "
embers that need to be put out," Trump's campaign claimed credit for the "phenomenal" success of his botched pandemic leadership.
Trump is now pretty much the sole figure in authority in either party -- including his major Republican allies -- who refuse to wear or endorse face masks that are proven to slow the spread of coronavirus but that he has stigmatized as a liberal plot to harm him politically.
But Trump on Tuesday tweeted cryptically "THE LONE WARRIOR!" -- apparently embracing his isolation from even political allies and the scientific approaches that have proven elsewhere to at least slow the spread of the coronavirus in the short term.
Undeterred by the deepening national crisis, Trump is pressing ahead with plans for an early
July Fourth celebration at Mount Rushmore that will bracket him symbolically and without irony alongside four of America's most revered Presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. The social distancing advised by Trump's government will not be enforced.
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