Trump just made Biden’s closing argument for him
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 30, 2020 at 4:23 p.m. CDT
This is
the time for presidential candidates to make their closing arguments, but Joe
Biden didn’t really have to.
President
Trump did it for him.
“The
Fake News Media is riding COVID, COVID, COVID, all the way to the
Election. Losers!” he tweeted.
“Covid,
covid, covid, covid,” he said in Nebraska.
“Covid,
covid, covid, covid, covid, covid,” he said in North Carolina.
“Covid,
covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid!” he railed in Michigan
It was
as presidential as Jan Brady crying “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.”
Trump
was doubling down — actually, tripling, quadrupling, sextupling and decupling
down — on the very thing costing him the election: his incompetent and inhumane
handling of the greatest mass trauma in living memory for the vast majority of
Americans.
·
His callous disregard for at least 228,000 Americans dead from
the virus (they apparently ignored him when he said, “Don’t let it dominate your life”) and the millions out of work.
·
His ridicule of the media, Democrats and the public for paying
attention to the pandemic at a time when a record number of Americans (nearly 90,000 Thursday) are getting infected, and 1,000
are dying, daily. “It is what it is.”
·
His incessant lies about “rounding the corner” on the virus,
which is “ending,” even as cases rise in 42 states and overwhelmed hospitals consider rationing.
·
His let-them-eat-cake attitude that Americans shouldn’t fear the
virus, when he had a squadron of top doctors spending a fortune in taxpayer money to give him advanced and
experimental treatments nobody else can get.
·
His contempt for science and masks, his rushed reopening, and
his crackpot remedies that led to worst-in-the-world fatalities in the United
States.
Trump
is unfit for the office he holds, and it was good of him to encapsulate so
succinctly why he must be replaced with a leader of competence and compassion:
Covid, covid, covid!
We
needn’t look back over the past four years — joblessness, debt, racial strife
and international disdain — to see why Trump is unfit. We need only look back
at the past two weeks.
·
He returned to calling immigrants “rapists” and “murderers”
and referred to “Barack Hussein Obama.”
·
He mockingly mispronounced Kamala Harris’s name and used the racist
trope of labeling the African American Democratic vice-presidential nominee
“angry.”
·
His senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, proposed that Black Americans don’t “want to be
successful.”
·
Trump’s campaign, after a rally in frigid Omaha, stranded supporters for hours, landing some in the
hospital.
·
Judge-appointed lawyers said they couldn’t find the parents of 545 migrant children the
Trump administration separated from their parents.
·
Trump embraced a “lock her up” chant directed at the Michigan
governor, target of a kidnapping plot.
·
Covid-19 relief talks collapsed after the Senate Republican leader told the
White House not to make a deal.
·
A federal judge struck down Trump’s plan to slash food stamps for 700,000
unemployed Americans.
·
Stocks plunged, suffering their worst week and month since March
as pandemic fears outweighed strong third-quarter growth.
·
Trump opened 9.3 million pristine acres of rainforest in Alaska
to logging and development.
·
A Trump political appointee resigned in protest because a new presidential order
destroys the integrity of the civil service.
·
Trump promoted dubious allegations against Biden that news
outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, said could not be corroborated by the evidence.
·
Trump told women in Michigan that “we’re getting your husbands
back to work.”
·
And he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Israel’s prime minister to join
him in ridiculing “Sleepy Joe.”
Meanwhile,
news broke that:
·
Trump’s administration ousted the top scientist at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration after he reminded Trump appointees not to manipulate
scientific findings.
·
The U.S. Postal Service’s on-time delivery dropped below 60 percent in swing states after a Trump
ally sabotaged operations.
·
Trump’s businesses have received at least $8.1 million from taxpayers and
supporters since he took office.
·
Creditors forgave some $270 million of his unpaid debts related to
a Chicago building project a decade ago.
But
leading the latest parade of horribles has been pandemic ineptitude: the White
House issuing a report taking credit for “ending the covid-19 pandemic,” Trump’s
claiming we’re “rounding the turn” even as his chief of staff says “we are not
going to control the pandemic,” and Vice President Pence campaigning despite an
outbreak among his staff.
The
White House justified Pence’s recklessness by saying he “has the best doctors in the world around him.”
The hell with those he might infect.
The
millions who have lost friends and loved ones, lost jobs, lost a year of their
lives in the unmet hope that the government would do its job? Go tell Biden.
It’s just nuisance noise to Trump.
Covid,
covid, covid.
