Day 1,374: Trump angry media keeps mentioning COVID-19 instead of non-existent plane crashes
To date, 8.5 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and 224,000 have died from it. To make matters worse, cases are surging nationwide. Donald Trump has never executed a plan to stem the tide, despite most nations in the world largely back to pre-coronavirus life due to foresight and hard work.
With 10 days until Election Day, Trump wants to talk about anything other than COVID-19, which apparently includes going to Mars. At rallies, he whines about news coverage of a pandemic that is the third leading cause of death for Americans in 2020. He ignores the fact that the death toll could easily double in just four more months unless substantial changes are made.
During a Saturday rally in North Carolina, Trump lamented the media’s focus on COVID-19 instead of when covering stories about when a “plane goes down” and kills “500 people.”
Except planes aren’t going down. The last fatal U.S. airline crash was nearly 12 years and 8 billion passengers ago.
If anything, Trump severely undercut his own point about media focus on the coronavirus.
For context, if a plane carrying 500 people crashed every day for a year, 40,000 less people would be killed by those plane crashes than COVID-19 has already killed in the U.S. (On average, nearly two of Trump’s hypothetical 500-person planes have been crashing for 200-plus days.) Those crashes would be major news the media would cover non-stop: the deaths, the fallout, who was at fault, what was happening to rectify the situation.
And if even one jumbo jet was falling out of the sky even every week, passengers wouldn’t travel, the FAA would quickly shut flying down, and there would be major investigations into the problems and possible solutions.
In reality, Trump refuses to do even the bare minimum to get COVID-19 under control. He brags about slowing testing down, despite it being the key to getting the U.S. back to normal. He mocks those who wears face masks and casts doubt on their utility, even as scientists routinely point to their efficacy in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. When governors placed certain temporary COVID-19-based restrictions on state residents, Trump urged people to “liberate” their cities.
Despite social distancing guidelines from the CDC, Trump holds fundraisers and large rallies, with thousands of people shoulder-to-shoulder, both inside and outside. Experts have been replaced with politicians. Long-term solutions are eschewed in favor of fake timelines and empty promises for immediate vaccines, wonder drugs and cures.
While Trump wants to make up invented plane crashes that the media isn’t covering, history also won’t be kind to Trump for the horrific job he’s done during one of the largest health crises in modern American history. Had he been more proactive and serious, and acted in a way beyond trying to get people to pretend the virus simply went away, perhaps the U.S. would be like most of the rest of the world, with COVID-19 largely in the rearview mirror.
1,374 days in, 88 to go
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