Not bothering to hide his indifference and contempt for science, the President made clear on Sunday that it's more important to him to be ultimately proven right about the pandemic than to reconsider his disastrous approach that is doing little to stop its deadly spread.
Until then, America must endure crammed ICUs in virus-ravaged states, thousands more deaths and the prospect of cities slumping back into economically crippling lockdowns that crush hopes of a return to work and school with normal life as only a memory.
Trump's passive leadership becomes more neglectful the worse the crisis gets -- with more than 140,000 Americans now dead.
"I'll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know I said, 'It's going to disappear.' I'll say it again," Trump said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday."
Ignoring how the coronavirus is raging out of control and that other nations have done far better in suppressing its spread, Trump called Dr. Anthony Fauci's truth telling about the situation "alarmist." The White House is meanwhile pushing back against Senate Republicans' requests for more money for a belated testing and tracing operation deemed critical to finally crushing the virus and helping America emerge from its nightmare.
Trump's willingness to accept an elevated level of victims while leaving the impression there's nothing to be done but wait until the storm passes shows an extraordinarily disengaged and callous interpretation of the duties of the presidency. It doesn't even seem to make much sense from an objective view of his political self-interest. A Washington Post/ABC News poll published Sunday, for instance, showed that Democratic presumptive nominee Joe Biden had a 20-point lead over Trump in public confidence in handling the pandemic.
View Trump and Biden head-to-head polling
Despite finding every 2020 campaign aspiration blocked -- a return to rallies, a rebound in the polls, an economic bounce back and attention for his assaults on Biden -- Trump is unwilling or unable to admit the depth of the emergency.
While there is a strong desire in the country to return to regular life -- a feeling on which Trump is playing with his demand to reopen all schools -- the President is ignoring public concern over whether such a step is safe. Similarly, his semantic quibbles about the mortality rate from the disease show that he cares about the situation far less than his top priority -- reelection.
In fact, as he escalates his campaign of fear and race baiting, he is making clear that he is betting he can win in November while ignoring a disease killing hundreds of Americans every day. To that end, the President is spending more energy on concocting excuses, blaming others and peddling falsehoods about the crisis than he is directing his government to help alleviate the disaster.
His approach suggests that he does not believe he needs to triumph over a threat to the American people but merely needs to convince sufficient numbers of them that he'
