As of Monday evening, coronavirus has killed more people in the U.S. than 9/11. Which, as you may recall if you were there at the time, was an event so big that it Changed Everything and was worth any level of governmental response. Republicans got two wars out of 9/11, but now front-line health care workers can’t even get enough masks.
The more than 3,000 deaths and counting included 500 on Monday alone, as the Trump administration started preparing Americans for the prospect of hundreds of thousands of deaths before this is all over. It’s a far cry from two months ago, when Trump said, “We have it very well under control.” Or one month ago, when he was saying, “We’re going very substantially down, not up” and “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
Some of Trump’s loyalists have also made giant flaming fools of themselves. “Approximately 7500 people die every day in the United States,” Rudy Giuliani tweeted just last week, citing Candace Owens as his source. “That’s approximately 645,000 people so far this year. Coronavirus has killed about 1,000 Americans this year. Just a little perspective.”
Well, Mr. Noun-verb-9/11, how’s this for perspective? Just four days later, the number of U.S. deaths had tripled.
Unfortunately, within days coronavirus will have left 9/11 comparisons fading out of sight in the rearview mirror, along with the Iraq War, which at this point is a rapidly approaching benchmark.
“It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away,” Donald Trump told us on March 10. Instead, thousands of people have died alone and scared, and it’s not going away.
