Donald Trump is in over his head, and people are dying as a result.
The president has botched the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic beyond comprehension, and instead of learning from his mistakes, Trump just makes new ones that are even worse.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration officially withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization at a time when the virus is spiraling out of control in the South and West. If there is an intelligent or obvious decision to make, Donald Trump goes the other way. Every. Single. Time.
The president’s handling of the pandemic has been so consistently obtuse, it almost feels like it is intentional. How is it possible that Trump can be this inept when he is surrounded by the best scientific minds in the country?
In Europe, they have the virus under control. In Australia and New Zealand, they have the virus under control. In Asia, they have the virus under control.
And, yet, here were are. Continuing to suffer. All the sacrifices people made during the spring to stem the disease have been rendered pointless, as the confirmed death toll in this country now approaches 132,000.
They tell Trump that wearing a mask is the best way to prevent spreading the virus. He refuses to do it. They tell Trump it is a public-health risk to hold campaign rallies. He does it anyway. Doesn’t just do it, mind you -- intentionally creates an atmosphere to encourage reckless behavior.
In Tulsa, after the president ignored public-health officials’ pleas to cancel his indoor rally, his campaign staffers removed stickers from chairs that encouraged physical distancing. In South Dakota, they zip-tied chairs together to ensure people would be as tightly packed as possible.
Now, Trump is planning to hold another rally in New Hampshire this weekend, and he is demanding the Republican National Convention be staged as if there were no issues in a state, Florida, where the situation has deteriorated with alarming speed.
Who would have thought we would ever live to see a time when the President of the United States was the No. 1 danger to the health and safety of Americans? That is our reality.
And when Trump leads, his army of unscrupulous and uneducated sycophants follow. Shameless Republican leaders -- like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey -- have led their states’ citizens down a disastrous path that is only going to get worse in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, Trump’s constituency of conspiracy-theory adherents continue to ignore public-health guidance and do as they please. The result of that kind of negligent behavior ensnared a big fish Tuesday when virus-denying Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro tested positive for COVID-19.
Back in March, for one brief moment, after he saw an Imperial College report that indicated more than two million Americans could die if he did nothing, Trump was shocked into action. He assembled a team of experts, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, and started holding his now infamous daily news conferences, while the country locked itself down in large numbers.
It appeared, for once, Trump was going to listen to the adults in the room, and maybe, just maybe, everything would be all right.
That dim light faded almost immediately after Trump saw a political pundit on Fox News tell him through the television that we cannot let the cure be worse than the disease. The next day, Trump parroted the same phrase, and it has been all downhill ever since.
From there, he has encouraged extremist elements to go against his own administration’s health guidance, seriously questioned whether Americans should consume bleach and pursued a strategy of wishful thinking, hoping the virus will disappear on its own. When the president talks about cures and diseases, he’s got it all wrong.
Trump is the disease, and there is only one cure.
He has got to go.