Trump's been wrong about every single thing he's said and done related to the virus. It didn't "go away" in the spring or summer like he said it would. Testing didn't get better by any measure that matters, as was obvious by the nation's surging case counts over much of the summer. State economies haven't taken off "like a rocket ship." School reopenings have gone disastrously bad, so far, with many being forced to close almost immediately due to coronavirus outbreaks. And Trump's unending incompetence has convinced many, if not most, of the nation's school systems to start the school year remotely. Some estimates say at least half of the nation's kids will spend much or all of the fall in virtual classrooms, according to The New York Times.
In other words, the nation is in tatters right now, even as other industrialized countries have reopened their economies and their school systems with many notable success stories and some setbacks.
But no comparable industrialized nation has mishandled the pandemic from front to back as badly as the Trump administration has in the U.S. So the West Wing’s notion that things are relatively copacetic and they've gotten a sense of how to combat the virus is simply stunning. “I would say that they are comparing things to where they were previously,” one senior Republican said of the White House. “When you compare a disaster to an outright disaster, the disaster does not seem so bad.”
In essence, our fall disaster isn't nearly as bad as our spring disaster was. Now there's a campaign slogan for the ages. Unfortunately, we don't even know how bad the administration's fall disaster will be yet. But Trump’s White House is always keen on declaring victory before the results are in, just like when keeping the number of deaths to 65,000 was going to be a huge win—100,000 deaths ago.
But precisely because Trump spent the summer pushing for reopenings without laying any of the groundwork to do so, “the fall could be incredibly gruesome," notes Yale School of Medicine epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves. In fact, the nation is headed into a potentially perilous stretch of months in no better position than it was in June.
“I don’t feel like they kind of know what ‘under control’ would look like,” the GOP official close to the White House told Politico. “I don’t feel like even they know what the goal is.” The goal is to get Trump reelected at any and all costs to America, and they're very much on track to accomplish at least one of those two things.
