Donald Trump Is Literally Doing Nothing to Fight COVID-19

Yuri Gripas/CNP via ZUMA

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Let’s review our president’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic:

  • He has no plan for mass testing.
  • He has already let everyone know he’s unenthusiastic about masks.
  • He wants to “liberate” states from stay-at-home orders.
  • He wants to open up non-essential businesses as soon as possible.
  • He appears to have no particular opinion about social distancing, school closings, or large gatherings.

In other words, he literally has no concrete response to the pandemic at all, aside from closing our borders and passing along damaging fictions about vaccines and folk remedies. Meanwhile, his own director of the CDC—no liberal shill by any stretch—is warning that the second wave of COVID-19 later in the year is likely to be worse than the one we’re going through right now:

Asked about protests against stay-at-home orders and calls on states to be “liberated” from restrictions, Redfield said: “It’s not helpful.” The president himself has tweeted encouragements of such protests, urging followers to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

Forewarned is forearmed, they say. We have the next six months to build more ICU capacity; stockpile masks and protective gear for doctors and nurses; increase our testing capacity by at least 10x; and prepare a huge PR campaign based on what we learn from the first wave of COVID-19.

Is there any sign that Trump is interested in any of this? Not that I’ve seen.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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