The graph below is Exhibit 1 for how far the United States has sunk under the (mis)management of the Trump 'Administration'. It shows the seven-day rolling average of new coronavirus cases in the United States (population 328.2 million) and the 27 countries comprising the European Union (population 446 million).
This is what failure looks like. This is what incompetence looks like. This is what mismanagement looks like.
I have a question for Trumpers: Setting aside all political differences, don't you think we should have a federal government that is competent? Shouldn't we have a federal government capable of good management? What if the coronavirus had hit during the Obama years, and this was the graph of how well the Obama Administration had done in fighting it -- would you still think everything was hunky-dory, or would you be screaming your lungs out?
(Don't even try to use that ignorant "there's only more cases because there is more testing" crap on me. We're are testing more now because we failed to engage in testing and contact tracing at a time when it the virus wasn't so widely circulating. Testing could have been used at that time to discover who had the virus and isolate them, reducing spread. That's a large part of the reason the E.U. case rate is now so low. If only our federal government could have implemented such a program. In any event, differences in testing rates can't account for the massive gap shown in the graph.)
The difference between the two graph lines (good E.U. management of the coronavirus epidemic vs. pathetic U.S. management of it) equals unnecessary suffering and death for U.S. residents. Take the difference between the lines, multiply it by even a conservative fatality rate, and you can calculate the number of excess deaths caused by Trump's incompetence. (And these figures are actually understated, since the E.U. has 120 million more residents than the U.S., and should therefore have more coronavirus cases, all other things being equal.)
Taking the last point on the graph, 31,200 new cases in the U.S. daily versus 4,000 new cases in the E.U. daily means that, each day, about 27,200 Americans needlessly became infected due to Trump's incompetence. Those 27,200 will suffer during their illness and perhaps be permanently damaged by the virus. 27,200 excess illnesses per day means that over a 30-day month, 816,000 Americans will suffer from the coronavirus unnecessarily due to Trump's ineptitude. And that's assuming the top line doesn't keep increasing (but it will).
Using a conservative 1% fatality rate means that 272 Americans who became infected on the graph's last day will needlessly die. 272 American deaths per day equates to 8,160 excess deaths over the course of a 30-day month. Your Aunt, your former football coach, your friend's father, your sister's boyfriend -- dead because of the incompetence and inadequacy of Trump and his government.
Yet you continue to support him. Astonishing. Shameful.
The United States (supposedly "Great Again" after four years of Mr. "Only I Can Fix It") is mismanaging the coronavirus epidemic so badly that the Europeans are set to lump us in with Russia and Brazil and continue its ban on U.S. travellers entering European Union countries. If you are Algerian, or Serbian, or Australian, or Thai, the E.U. welcomes you, but residents of our Great-Again nation are dangerous and not welcome.
Makes you proud.
Then there's this:
The Trump Administration sent more than a million stimulus checks worth $1.4 billion to deceased people, according to data released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office.... The GAO report also found that because of an error in how payment calculations were made, almost half a million households that used an online IRS tool for those who don’t file tax returns did not receive the $500 payments for children that they should have.
Such gross ineptitude isn't surprising, since the top levels of the Trump 'Administration' consist largely of sycophants with no management experience, whose primary job is keeping Trump's fat, greasy ego fully fed.
In normal times, perhaps we could skate by with an mismanaged, missing-in-action federal government. But these aren't normal times. Trump's incompetence is literally killing us. When will Trumpers finally admit that he's in way over his head, and that he has to go?
Now would be a good time.
{{Postscript: I don't think the graph results are just from incompetence and mismanagement, although there's been plenty of that. It wasn't just incompetence when Trump said multiple times that the coronavirus would simply disappear. It was ignorance, a refusal to listen to those who know more than him, added to a pigheaded belief that fighting the virus vigorously would hurt the economy. It wasn't just mismanagement that caused so many Trumpers to refuse to wear masks and to crowd into confined spaces while ridiculously believing they were "liberating" their states. It was a willful "fuck you" to responsibility and civic duty, a out-and-out refusal to believe scientific facts, as egged on by Trump, because nowadays responsibility and civic duty and belief in science are pansy snowflake liberal qualities. But whether from incompetence or ignorance, Trump's put all of us in a dangerous place, and made Americans look like inept, clumsy, ignorant fools.}}