With Donald Trump’s coronavirus failures crushing the nation, former Vice President Joe Biden will make a speech Tuesday detailing those failures and outlining his proposals for a better way forward. “Trump has called himself a wartime president but is surrendering to the virus,” Biden will argue, according to a preview of his remarks reported by The Washington Post.
Along with the speech, the Biden campaign will introduce a scorecard showing Trump’s “failure to ‘level with the American people’; his inability to provide testing and treatment; shortfalls in securing a supply chain for protective equipment; and failures to protect workers, older Americans and small businesses,” the Post reports.
The scope of Trump’s failure can be illustrated in one fact: The U.S. has 4% of the world's population and 25% of its coronavirus cases. (No, that’s not just about good testing.) But that outcome was produced by many, many different failures, from Trump’s early refusal to admit there was a problem and try to prevent it, to delays in adequate testing, to Trump ordering a testing slowdown so he wouldn’t look bad, to his promotion of unproven treatments, to his push for premature reopening, to his many failures to lead on masks and more. Oh, and the indoor, not socially distanced rallies he’s held. And that’s not even getting into all the ways Trump made the U.S. less prepared for a pandemic in the years before this one emerged.
Biden’s proposals, which he will pull together in his Tuesday speech, have included free testing and treatment, a federal guarantee of “regular, reliable, free access to testing for every worker called back on the job,” emergency paid leave for people who have the virus or are caring for loved ones who do, child care assistance and increased pay for essential workers, increased production of personal protective equipment, and aggressive tracking to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks from spreading out of control (as is now happening).
Trump’s failures are so abject and glaring that Biden will have plenty of material. The question is whether the media will pay him a tenth of the attention Trump’s most unhinged ranting gets, allowing voters to see the contrast between the two.