In the world according to Donald Trump, the coronavirus scare has passed and he and his administration absolutely nailed it.
"I think in a certain way, maybe our best work has been on what we’ve done with Covid-19,” Trump told ABC's David Muir in an interview Tuesday night. But when asked whether he was comfortable with the election becoming a referendum on his pandemic response, Trump waffled, offering: "Well, I am, and I'm not."
You see, in Trump's view, he's done so many great things, it's hard to choose just one. "You know, I've built the greatest economy," he noted, and then there was the tax giveaway to the mega-wealthy, getting all those stellar right-wing judges confirmed, slashing environmental regulations and safety standards for slaughterhouses, separating families, caging kids, legitimizing neo-Nazis, he hasn’t totally broken the healthcare system but he ain’t done yet. Frankly, it’s an endless stream of giant successes with more to come.
“I hope it’s not solely on what I’ve done here," Trump said of basing his reelection on the coronavirus, "because this is a very — this is like rubber. It’s very, very amorphous.”
Actually, like rubber, it's anything but amorphous. There's a continually rising U.S. body count for the dead—more than 72,500 as of Wednesday morning. There are hard numbers for infections, presently more than 1.2 million in the country and growing. There are also more than 30 million jobless claims filed by Americans—surely an undercount of those who have lost work—but also nearly 10 million more jobs lost than were created in the decade since the Great Recession.
So yeah, that's actually tangible stuff to judge by. And despite what Trump believes and is telling America to believe, it ain’t over by a long shot.