The president who allegedly wants four more years is pouting in private, apparently unable to come to terms with the outcome of the election. He’s only been seen once in public since election night when he appeared at Arlington National Cemetery on Veteran’s Day.
He’s been reportedly meeting with advisers to plot a strategy to save himself, but what about us? What about the millions of Americans who’ve been sickened in a pandemic that is surging with record numbers of new cases every day. Yesterday more than 150,000 Americans tested positive for the virus. The Washington Post put it best:
The contrast between the nation grappling with an ongoing global crisis and a president consumed with his own political problems highlighted a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Trump’s assault on the integrity of the U.S. election system: He is leveraging the power of his office in a long-shot bid to stay in the job while ignoring many of the public duties that come with it.
NBC’s “Meet The Press” writes:
You have little to no president-ing going on. (Trump has not delivered public remarks since Nov. 5, and there’s been no movement whatsoever in passing new coronavirus relief.)
And most important of all, it’s all coming during the worst spike yet in new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations since the virus arrived in the country. (There have been nearly 1 million new coronavirus cases and 7,500 deaths in the U.S. since Trump’s last remarks on Nov. 5, per NBC’s Peter Alexander and Sally Bronston.)
The coronavirus – and the federal government’s response to it, or lack thereof – represents arguably the biggest American public policy failure since Vietnam.
And you have a president who’s been trying to convince the American people he wants to keep his job, despite the election results, but who hasn’t been doing the work of president.