As the United States death toll from the coronavirus reaches 100,000, the Trump administration appears to have given up on developing a national testing policy.
As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pointed out on Tuesday, the deadline for the administration to come up with a federal testing strategy was this past weekend, and the plan they released essentially said it is entirely up to the states to fix this mess.
“This is their national strategy, this long into it,” Maddow said. “100,000 Americans dead and this is their national strategy for testing.”
The MSNBC host added, “This also means specifically and logistically that we are back to the brilliant idea of all 50 states competing against each other for testing and materials and lab capacity that you need to get testing done.”
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Maddow said:
Well, as part of one of the coronavirus relief packages that passed Congress and the president signed in late April, Democrats insisted during the negotiations over that relief package that the administration should be required to come up with a national testing strategy within one month of that bill becoming law. Well, the one-month deadline was this weekend. The administration did type up and print out something they are calling their supposed testing strategy. What does it say? Here’s the lead in the New York Times summarizing it: ‘The Trump administration’s new testing strategy holds individual states responsible for planning and carrying out all coronavirus testing.’ This is their national strategy, this long into it. 100,000 Americans dead and this is their national strategy for testing. The strategy is the states will do it, won’t they? Let’s just say that’s going to be the way this works. I mean, importantly, this is not only a complete abdication of the federal responsibility here. This also means specifically and logistically that we are back to the brilliant idea of all 50 states competing against each other for testing and materials and lab capacity that you need to get testing done. Just like we saw with PPE and everything else from the very beginning, all 50 states are all on their own. You all try to figure it out. See which one of you gets the best deal. See which one of you can steal resources from the others. We’re not all in this together. Every state’s in it for themselves, even this far into it.
Donald Trump has the attention span of a squirrel, so it’s no surprise that he no longer seems to care about a pandemic that is still infecting and killing people all across the country.
He spent months pretending to care about the virus and now he appears content to return to his usual presidential schedule of hate tweeting, golfing, and MAGA rallies.
For Trump, it was likely the moment he was told to stop holding his daily coronavirus pep rallies at the White House that he stopped pretending to give a damn about a deadly virus ripping through the nation.
After all, if he couldn’t make this crisis all about himself at least once a day, then what’s the point?
But just because Donald Trump got bored doesn’t mean this virus is under control. In fact, as Rachel Maddow pointed out on Tuesday, the federal government still has yet to implement a national testing policy.
The president’s complete failure to competently manage the federal government has cost tens of thousands of lives.
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