President Donald Trump’s speech on Thursday – and the events surrounding the Republican National Convention in general – sometimes came out as a celebration: a series of rhetorical monuments to a president who, based on what he and his supporters said, America had triumphantly performed through one of its best periods.
It’s a picture that’s hard to reconcile with Trump’s actual record. Under Trump, they refueled the economy. The country is in the throes of widespread unrest as Black Lives Matter protests and related riots continue. The homicide rate in big cities has spiked, and the opioid epidemic continues.
And more than 180,000 Americans have died so far from Covid-19.
The contrast was perfectly captured by this photo posted on Twitter by USA Today reporter Matt Today, in which Protestants pointed to the massive death toll from America’s Covid-19, stood in front of the fireworks of the Republican convention:
It’s a moment that encapsulates what came out of a week of gas lighting on Covid-19 by Trump and the Republican convention – an attempt to make America think that a president who so clearly failed was actually a victory for the US.
Experts, and the data, tell a very different story than what Trump tried to suggest.
For one, Trump’s performance on Covid-19 has really been a disaster. When the coronavirus first reached America, Trump was slow to respond, suggesting instead that the virus would suddenly disappear “like a miracle.” As soon as states began to shut down, Trump urged them to reopen early and soon – after “LIBERATE” themselves of economic calamity. His administration was slow to expand the testing capacity of the US, instead of the problem to local, state and private actors. When his administration suggested that people wear masks in public, Trump said it was a personal choice, refused to even wear a mask, and claimed that people wear masks to spit on him. Instead of offering quiet, collected messages during a crisis, Trump was unfair – at one point thinking about people injecting bleach to treat Covid-19.
The result: America stands out as the only developed country, with the possible exception of Spain, that not only failed to prevent a massive coronavirus outbreak when it first arrived in the spring, but has continued to struggle deep into the summer . While many other developed countries, from Germany to South Korea, are looking back to normal, America continues to see high numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths.
It is a uniquely bad position, as this map of Covid-19 deaths in developed countries shows:
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Our world in data
That failure on Covid-19 “begins in many ways, and you can argue that it ends in many ways, with the Trump administration,” Ashish Jha, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told me. “If George W. Bush had been president, if John McCain had been president, if Mitt Romney had been president, this would have looked very different.”
But in a reorganization campaign, Trump wants to do everything he can to mask his failure. That we get a strange festive convention when there is not much to celebrate in America.
For more on Trump’s failure on Covid-19, read Vox’s full statement.
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