Donald Trump ventured outside the White House on Tuesday, loading up Air Force One with a full staff to head to the Honeywell factory in Phoenix, Arizona, where workers are busy cranking out N95 medical grade masks around-the-clock for healthcare workers.
The appearance seemed designed to boost Donald Trump’s image rather than boost the morale of the workers trying to meet the demand. Instead of displaying steady leadership, it was more of a display of incompetence and toxic masculinity, starting with the fact that Donald Trump apparently refused to wear a mask in a mask factory where everyone from top management to assembly line workers were all wearing masks in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19. Apparently unwilling to be photographed in a mask, Trump instead chose to potentially expose everyone he came in contact with instead. And make no mistake about it, these folks are absolutely essential to combatting this disease. And Trump, along with his traveling cast of sycophants, put them all at risk by refusing to wear masks.
It is fitting then that as Trump toured the factory, his Trump rally playlist began blaring over the loud speakers. Putting aside how highly inappropriate it is to to mesh his rally optics with official White House visits, it provided an absolutely surreal moment: Trump stood there getting a rundown on mask production as the Guns & Roses cover of “Live and Let Die” nearly drowned out the discussion.
Yes, that really happened. It seems something more fitting for an episode of Veep, but here we are. Approaching 75,000 dead Americans from a pandemic and even with a no-brainer photo op to a mask factory, this reality show president still fucked it up.
But, his day wasn’t over. He used the factory as a backdrop for an interview with David Muir of ABC News, a very rare interview outside of the cozy confines of Fox News. Seeing Trump’s sagging polls, they must’ve been forced to expand the audience. Except this interview did not likely do Trump any favors. Muir noted Trump has consistently harped on the “empty cupboards” of supplies left by President Obama. (NOTE: Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Mitch McConnell drastically slashed and blocked public health funds overall and pandemic funding specifically during Obama’s two terms.) Muir then asked what Trump had done to restock those cupboards and he said, “Well, I’ll be honest, I have a lot of things going on. A lot of people who refused to allow the country to be successful.”
You can see that below, but he had no answer. He did nothing. Worse than nothing, he threw out the pandemic manual the Obama administration left them because they knew how unprepared Trump was for this role, they disbanded and the global pandemic team inside the White House and Trump ignored more than two months of increasingly alarming reports from the intelligence community and global health experts.
You can see the rest of the interview here, but Trump went further saying his administration’s COVID-19 response has been “maybe our best work.” Closing in on 75,000 deaths and this is some of the administration’s “best work”? What does he think a bad job looks like?
For the record, South Korea and the United States announced their first confirmed COVID-19 cases on the very same day in January. South Korea wasted no time in rolling out nationwide testing, locking the country down, providing food and supplies to quarantined citizens and much more. The entire country of South Korea, which has a population of around 51 million people, has had a total of 255 deaths from COVID-19. As of today, more than 72,000 Americans have died. And that is some of his “best work.”
South Korea took a scientific and humanitarian approach. Trump opted for the “Live and Let Die” approach and where did that get us? We can do better in November. We must.
