WASTED TIME

He finally wore a mask.  President Donald Trump, the man who has repeatedly downplayed the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic, the man who has even said that some people wearing masks in this country were doing so only to spite him.  Even he finally decided to wear a mask publicly yesterday while visiting a veteran's hospital.  Although on the one hand this may seem like no big deal, it clearly shows that our president, despite his innate belief that he has never made a mistake in his life, must admit that the country's fight against the pandemic has been an abject failure under his leadership.
There are two big issues that have dominated the media in the past few months: the pandemic and the protests over police brutality and the conversation about racial reckoning that those protests have brought.  It's obvious where Trump stands in the latter: he has threatened to veto a defense bill that includes changing the names of military bases that bear the names of Confederate generals, while calling the Black Lives Matter movement "hateful."  Clearly there's no way that he will stop stoking the flames of racial hatred before the election.  He knows that his base loves it. 
But the pandemic is a much trickier problem for him.  No matter how much Trump lies and tries to convince the world that his distorted version of reality is the truth, the facts about the pandemic cannot be avoided.  Our attempt to shutdown the country to lower the spread of the virus has not worked; in fact,, things are actually worse now than they were at the beginning of the shutdown, with record numbers of new infections rocking the country.  Today Florida reported fifteen thousand new cases, a number that tops even the infection rate that the state of New York had at the beginning of the pandemic.
The really tragic thing is that this could have been avoided.  Although there are a  number of factors, the main reason that our country has failed so poorly has been the chaotic response of the Trump administration and the echoing response of conservative  governors in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona.  During the shut down, states like those demanded that they be allowed to reopen their businesses and gathering places, even though they did not meet the guidelines set by the federal Center for Disease Control. “When you look at some of the most draconian orders that have been issued in some of these states and compare Florida,” Florida Governor  Ron DeSantis said back in April, "Florida has done better."  Sadly, that is no longer true.
Really, this conservative movement to reopen businesses and public gatherings  has been in complete defiance of common sense; anyone could see months ago that while the virus was hitting the coastal state of New York the hardest, that it would inevitably spread around the country and that reopening beaches and bars was a recipe for disaster.  But they did it anyway, acting out of a combination of blind hope and worry about the economic losses that the shutdown was causing.
And so here we are, with perhaps the worst part of the epidemic in front of us instead of behind us.  Facing another possible shutdown even as  other, better run countries start to reopen (and bar our citizens from entering!).  It is only in the shadow of things getting this bad that Trump has finally decided to publicly put on a mask, which is the equivalent of putting a band aid on a bloody stump.  And while it's good to see him actually modeling positive behavior for other Americans, he deserves no credit.  Last Wednesday, Tulsa Oklahoma health director Dr. Bruce Dart freely admitted that a surge of coronavirus cases in his city was “more than likely” linked to the June Twentieth rally that Trump held in that city.  So our president has not only been incompetent in dealing with the pandemic, he has actually made it worse just to hold one of his ego boosting rallies.  No mere face mask can cover up his pathetic indifference in the face of so much pain and suffering.