Donald Trump’s latest attempt to escape responsibility for his deadly coronavirus failures is to try and write off the blue states. As the alleged president of the United States, he is only interested in being associated with some of the states.
“If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at,” he said during a Wednesday briefing. “We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed.” Where to start? Perhaps with this fact: The number of deaths in just red states would still put the U.S. second in the global COVID-19 death rankings, behind Brazil, Philip Bump reports. That would mean that the U.S. would have 11% of global coronavirus deaths compared with its 4% of the world’s population. That’s the success Trump is trying to claim.
At this point, Bump categorizes blue states as accounting for 53% of U.S. coronavirus deaths, and red states as accounting for 47%—more than 90,000—and moving up. At least 70% of new coronavirus deaths have been in red states every single day since mid-July.
But of course what happened in blue states early in the pandemic is in significant part Trump’s responsibility. From tests that came too late in too small numbers to inadequate personal protective equipment to Trump’s undermining of public health messages on things like staying home and wearing masks, Trump influenced what happened in states like New York and New Jersey and Michigan (which, don’t forget, has a Democratic governor but went for Trump in 2016). Trump delayed the national response that could have dramatically slowed the spread of the virus, telling Bob Woodward about how dangerous COVID-19 was at the same time he was telling the public there was nothing to worry about, then later admitting to Woodward that he had deliberately downplayed the threat.
And that’s not even getting into all the things Trump did to make the U.S. less ready for a pandemic before the coronavirus ever emerged in humans, from dismantling a pandemic response team to ending pandemic preparedness simulations to cutting off funding for a pandemic early warning program.
Like it or not—and Trump obviously doesn’t like it, either—Trump controls a lot of what happens in the United States, not just the states he deigns to take credit for on any given day.
Trump’s attempt to write off the blue states was so outrageous that it’s almost a side note that it came in the midst of claiming an overall win even if blue-state deaths count. “This was a prediction that if we do a really good job, we’ll be at about 100,000 and—100,000 to 240,000 deaths, and we’re below that substantially, and we’ll see what comes out,” he said. “But that would be if we did a good job. If the not-so-good job was done, you’d be between 1.5 million—I remember these numbers so well—and 2.2 million. That’s quite a difference.”
We’re not supposed to remember that Trump’s use of the 240,000 number back in May was an attempt to move the goalposts to a place he thought he could still look successful. We’re not supposed to remember that the U.S. is close to 200,000 deaths and rising, or that excess mortality for the year is well over 240,000, suggesting that coronavirus deaths have been significantly undercounted. We’re not supposed to remember that estimates of millions of deaths were what could happen if the government did nothing to control the spread of the virus, and that those estimates scared Trump into taking a little action, too late—but also that most of the most serious restrictions were put into place by the very blue-state governors Trump attacked back then for doing too much and is attacking now—after many blue states have been extremely successful in driving down transmission rates—for their states having been hit hard early in the pandemic.
He would be a pathetic excuse for a weak, whiny, lying human being under any circumstances. His position of power in the world makes it even worse.