Week one: 3-9 May. Along with toilet paper, which remains scarce, condolence cards are sold out, though birthday cards are plentiful. Popular images include a trail of footprints in the sand and an angel with its forehead pressed into the crook of its arm.
As confirmed American coronavirus deaths pass 67,000, the president declares, in an interview with Fox News held inside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are traditionally banned: ‘They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.’ A Twitter wit writes that, for the massive marble sculpture looming above, ‘It was the second worst thing Lincoln ever watched.’
Internal White House documents predict three thousand American deaths a day by the end of May. The president tweets: ‘Getting great reviews, finally, for how well we are handling the pandemic.’ He retweets that the Trump Turnberry golf course has been named by Golf World magazine as the best golf course in the UK and Ireland for 2020.
The Senate reconvenes, but not for further pandemic legislation or to consider the more than six hundred bills that have already been passed by the Democrat-controlled House, which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has ignored. Instead, he is eager to approve a young ultra-right protégé of his, previously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association, as a lifetime judge. Although the majority of the one hundred senators are elderly and at risk in such a large gathering, the Capitol’s attending physician says that he does not have enough coronavirus tests for all of them.
Republicans continue the fight against voting by mail. (The president has said that if this were universally allowed, ‘you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,’ though he himself mails in his ballot.) In Wisconsin in April, the Republican-majority Supreme Court had demanded that voters appear in person, leading to a spike in infections. In Texas, which permits voting by mail for the ill, the attorney general rules that fear of Covid-19 is an ‘emotional reaction ... and does not, by itself, amount to a “sickness”’. (...)
In the ten days after the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, reopens gyms, spas, hair salons, tattoo parlours and other essential services, confirmed coronavirus cases in the state rise by 42 per cent.
Ohio representative Nino Vitale explains why he is opposed to face masks: ‘We’re created in the image and likeness of God. When we think of image, do we think of a chest or our legs or our arms? We think of their faces. I don’t want to cover people’s faces ... That’s the image of God right there and I want to see it in my brothers and sisters.’
As part of the Republican strategy to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment as a rallying point for the presidential election and distraction from the pandemic, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo (who, like many Republicans, calls Covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’), says: ‘There is a significant amount of evidence that [the virus] came from that laboratory in Wuhan. The best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.’ When it is pointed out that the director of national intelligence has said that the scientific consensus is that the virus was not artificial or genetically modified, Pompeo says: ‘That’s right. I agree with that. Yeah. I’ve seen their analysis ... I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate.’
Asked by an interviewer what lessons have been learned from the coronavirus, the president replies: ‘Now, the one thing that the pandemic has taught us is that I was right.’ He explains: ‘You know, I had people say, “No, no, it’s good. You keep – you do this and that.” Now those people are really agreeing with me. And that includes medicine and other things, you know.’
by Eliot Weinberger, LRB | Read more:
[ed. See also: Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over (The Guardian).]
[ed. See also: Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over (The Guardian).]
