May 3, 2020: Donald J. Trump - Maestro of Misinformation

 

5/3/20: The Trump administration continues to write a “glorious record,” as the nation reopens for business. 

Sunday afternoon, a check of the John Hopkins University website indicates the U.S. has 1,154,621 confirmed cases of COVID-19. 

Th death toll stands at 67,451.

 

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Maestro of Misinformation.

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Sadly, your favorite blogger has fallen behind in his posts. That means we’re catching up today. Last week, Trump, the Maestro of Misinformation, was busy bragging that under his guiding hand the United States was killing it when it came to testing. He claimed that people in every other country dreamed of having a bold orange leader like him. He insisted the U.S. had done more tests for the virus than all other countries combined. 

If we went to Worldometers, we found that the Maestro was off a tad. The U.S. had done more tests than any other nation. 

We’d done 7.2 million. Spain had done 1.9 million, Italy 2.2 million, and the United Kingdom 1.2 million tests. If we added in France, 1.1 million, Germany, 2.6 million – okay, that’s already more than we’ve done – and then tossed in Russia, 4.1 million – and we started totaling numbers for the rest of the world in our head and got 17.5 million more… 

Okay, the Maestro is full of poo.

 

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WE DO KNOW that many states are opening back up. We hope, whether we like Trump or don’t, that the country recovers with speed. 

We also know that as of this morning, the Trump toadies were out in force, insisting that when the story of this time is written, historians will credit this president for a great success. “When history looks back on this,” Jared Kushner claimed, “they’ll say, man, the federal government acted really quickly and creatively, they threw a lot at the problem and saved a lot of lives.” 

(Wait, didn’t these very same guys spend weeks telling us, “Don’t worry, this virus is just the flu?”)

 

Here, it might be worth offering this chart, to show what happened when South Korea and the U.S. discovered the same day, they had their first case of the virus. The South started immediate testing. 

Trump kept denying there was reason for concern.

 

Total cases. 

                                    South Korea                           United States 

January 20                            1                                        1

March 2                         3,276                                    104     

March 5                         6,284                                    225

March 7                         7,000+                                              401

March 17                       8,320                                   4,661

 

By March 21, South Korea had already done 300,000 tests for the coronavirus. The U.S., with six times the population, had done 170,000. The cost of delay was soon evident. 

March 29                       9,661                                 137,294

April 6                          10,331                                337,971

April 24                        10,708                                887,622

May 3                           10,793                              1,186,073    

 

South Korea had contained the spread, at a cost of only 250 lives. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of South Korea, troops recently traded fire with enemy forces across the border in North Korea. 

Kim Jong-un, who some reports said was dead, has resurfaced. Three years and four months into Trump’s first term in office (hopefully, his only one) the North Korean dictator still has all the nuclear weapons he had when our president told us he was no longer a nuclear threat.

One easy way to tell: This was never the flu.