Presidential Posturing

IN A PURELY THEATRICAL, gratuitous gesture intended only for media consumption, president Trump offered to provide Covid19 testing for Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi. They both declined, citing the much greater need for testing among those who help heal victims of the virus, and the shortage of testing kits. Trump supporters will doubtless use this occasion to trumpet the president's great wisdom, compassion, nobility, and generosity. Trump is and always have been quite eager to benefit from exposure in the media that he so despises and constantly accuses of being fake. it is fake, but only when he tries to manipulate it. As of now a few more than five million Americans have been tested for Covid 19' According to the Chen school of public health at Harvard, we should by now be testing five million people per day, and by now every American American citizen should have been tested at least once. By February first trump was told that the virus was definitely coming to infect the United States. and he called it a hoax. A comprehensive consortium of pharmaceutical companies, the government, the military, and academia should have been assembled in a Manhattan project style effort to create a massive program of testing, tracing, isolating, and treatment. had this been instigated by the president, the economy need never have been shut down, the epidemic in the United States need never have occurred. Forty two percent of the American people approve of Trump's handling of the crisis, fifty seven percent disapprove. These numbers are of course identical to the president's overall approval rating.The epidemic seems for the moment to be damaging to Trump's prospects of being reelected, because of the epidemic's severity and because of the president's evident lack of effectiveness in controlling it, and lack of effectiveness in keeping the economy running. Despite the president's obvious intent on being hailed as a hero for stopping the virus, and despite his administration's and his supporters' efforts to portray his behavior as heroic, the American people can plainly see the lack of results, and assuming the crisis continues into late summer, the president will have difficulty being reelected. this is perhaps the only consolation we have for this horrible tragedy, but it is one worth savoring.