The United States, the world leader in Covid-19 infections and deaths, is reeling from an out-of-control resurgence of the virus that is racking up record numbers of 50,000-plus new infections each day now.
Texas, Florida and Arizona -- Republican-run states that most aggressively embraced Trump's impatient demands to get the economy open again -- are heading into what one expert warned is a viral threat that is approaching "apocalyptic" levels.
All over the country, including in rule-resistant Texas, authorities are imposing mask mandates that Trump will still not endorse and are slowing or reversing economic opening plans as a Covid-19 summer becomes reality. It now seems certain that a predicted fall spike of the virus will simply become an extension of relentless months of sickness and death.
Even Vice President Mike Pence, who rarely pauses his praise of Trump's "leadership," is beginning to see reality -- ditching his previously misleading claims that the US has "slowed the spread" as he instead vows to "flatten the curve." Meanwhile, 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who as co-chair of Black Voices for Trump was one of the surrogates at Trump's recent rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is now in the hospital with coronavirus.
None of this will stop Trump from heading to Mount Rushmore on Friday to bracket himself alongside the carved likenesses of four of America's greatest Presidents for an early Independence Day celebration that will ignore his own government's social distancing guidelines. Then Trump will return to Washington to watch the federal government's July 4 fireworks spectacular that is going ahead, even though it could draw thousands of people into downtown and imperil the city's fragile resurgence from its coronavirus nightmare.
Warnings by medical experts that this weekend's gatherings could produce even more disastrous infections than Memorial Day events mean this is hardly a time for national celebration.
That's why Trump's hyperbolic and misleading embrace of encouraging unemployment figures on Thursday -- he could barely wait an hour after their release before materializing for a boastful soliloquy in the White House briefing room -- seems so off key and selective. The President's desperation to tout some good news after so many grim weeks of controversy mostly served to exemplify the depth of his own political plight against a backdrop of what seems like an never-ending fight against the virus. The White House's victory lap -- when nearly 130,000 Americans are dead in a pandemic Trump initially ignored, then mismanaged, then ignored again -- exemplifies its perverse insistence to concentrate only on the economic pain caused by the national crisis rather than infections that are rising dramatically.
While everyone can be encouraged that the jobless rate surprisingly slipped to 11.1% in June, the news of rising cases and cities under siege that Trump dismissed could make Thursday's data a false dawn. Bars, restaurants and shops are closi
