On Thursday, as Trump releases the bits and pieces of the 60 Minutes interview that he thinks make CBS look like a big meanie for not pitching him more “softballs,” there’s one topic that stands out. It appears that many of the pitches that came in too hot for Trump to handle were on one topic: COVID-19.
It’s hard to understand why Trump would not want to spend a lot of time on this subject, since he’s been going around to his rallies and explaining that he’s saved millions of lives, everyone else was wrong, and if he had listened to Dr. Anthony Fauci, hundreds of thousands more would be dead. However, that does seem to leave something of a quandary in terms of that detail where more people have died of COVID-19 in the United States than any other nation on the planet, and are still dying at a rate that at is almost twice that of the second-worst nation.
In one of those 60 Minutes snippets, Trump explains the real culprit: People are dying from testing. "If we did half the testing, we would have half the cases,” said Trump. “If we did no testing—like many countries—we would have very few cases."
Trump does not explain which countries are saving the lives of their citizens by staying test-free. And he doesn’t explain why he hasn’t halted all testing to save Americans from this scourge.
And it’s not as if this is the first time Trump has pointed out the terrible threat America faces from people being tested from COVID-19. Back in June, Trump made it crystal-clear, by saying testing “creates more cases.”
“When you test, you create cases,” Trump said at a White House press conference. At a Tulsa rally that same week, he made he renewed his efforts to save lives by saying, “slow the testing down, please.”
It’s not like Republican governors haven’t tried to follow Trump’s advice. Numerous states have dropped their rate of testing enormously since July. States like Florida have managed to get their rates of testing down to fewer than 0.1% of the population. Last week, North Dakota managed to get its testing rate down so low that for three days running, they hit 100% positive results which … which, in Trump’s mind, represents hundreds of people who might have been saved if they had just been spared from testing.
Trump is right—the United States has done a lot of tests. At this point, there have been enough tests that one-third of the population might have been tested. However, the number of repeated tests is such that the actual number of individuals tested is closer to 1 in 7.
However, some places didn’t get the memo about the danger of testing. Seven nations have now tested everyone for COVID-19. So they must all be dead now. Denmark has tested about three-fourths of its population. That should open up a lot of Scandinavian real estate.
Or … it could be that nations like Hong Kong, Iceland, and Denmark, which have mounted extensive testing and case management systems, have much lower rates of both COVID-19 and deaths from COVID-19 than nations (or really, just the one nation) that decided that a national testing program wasn’t a great idea. And it could be that many of the nations that have low levels of testing have done so because they effectively isolated and crushed the pandemic months ago. They don’t have to conduct COVID-19 testing at a high level any more, just like the U.S. doesn’t have to test for smallpox … because it’s not there.
But no. It has to be the testing. Because, if it’s anything else, Trump is a mass-murdering failure who supervised the greatest preventable disaster in American history.