Donald Trump's break with reality has put him wildly out of step with most Americans on combatting the rampant spread of coronavirus throughout the country. New NPR/Ipsos polling released Tuesday showed that some 60% of Americans support enacting a national coronavirus plan and 76% back state laws requiring mask-wearing in public at all times.
But Trump, recently confronted with statistics showing the country's death toll on the rise with more than 1,000 Americans dying every day, told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan merely: "It is what it is." Effectively, c'est la vie as the coronavirus runs rampant through the South, the West, and new areas of the Midwest, exacting a heavy loss of human life along the way.
Trump's complete and utter failure to comprehend what is actually happening in the country and what he should be doing to meet the moment is mind-boggling. In the Swan interview, we witness Trump shuffling through giant graphs geared toward elementary-aged children that still don't quite compute in his brain. The distinction Swan makes between deaths as a proportion of cases versus deaths as a proportion of the population is entirely lost on Trump, let alone explaining to him why the latter is a stronger measure of how the country is faring.
Trump's imbecilic performance in that interview demonstrates exactly why he has proven incapable of mounting a national response, instead opting to simply let the virus rage in what he wrongly assumed would be a pandemic isolated to blue states.
But in the new NPR polling, the desires of average Americans ring out just as loudly as Trump's stupidity does in the Axios interview. Contrary to Trump's assertions in the interview, two-thirds of respondents say the U.S. is handling the pandemic worse than other countries.
And support among respondents for decisive, comprehensive federal and state action is overwhelming:
- 85% want government funding to expand COVID-19 testing and make it free of charge
- 83% want federal funding to make an eventual vaccine available to all Americans
- 76% support state laws requiring everyone to wear masks in public
- 62% want a single, national plan for reopening businesses
- 60% want a single, national plan for reopening schools
- 59% support a nationwide mandatory two-week shelter-in-place order
- 59% support their own state temporarily closing down all restaurants and nonessential businesses
"We've come to a pretty dire place when it comes to both the death toll and the spread of coronavirus across the country," said Ipsos pollster Mallory Newall. "Americans, as they grapple with the reality of just how grave the situation is, they're looking for sweeping, really broad, powerful action here."
In short, the vast majority of Americans aren't buying into Trump's fantasy that all is well on the home front. "We’ve done MUCH better than most other Countries in dealing with the China Virus," Trump tweeted Monday, blaming the media for trying to make him "look as bad as possible." Trump's sheer inability to comprehend the scope of the problem, along with what's necessary to address it, is a big part of what is sinking him in the polls. Americans are hungry for the very kind of decisive action Trump has refused to take, precisely because he’s incapable of taking it.