On Monday evening, the White House made a point of distancing itself from an alarming report that private administration data suggest the country's daily death toll could nearly double by month's end, reaching 3,000 Americans a day as states ease social distancing measures. The data, first reported by The New York Times, also suggested the rate of new coronavirus infections could spike from 25,000 per day now to 200,000 by the end of the month.
The information was prepared by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which stressed that it was only a “preliminary analysis,” not a forecast, according to CBS News. A White House spokesperson also downplayed the data that was reportedly pulled together by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “This is not a White House document, nor has it been presented to the coronavirus task force or gone through interagency vetting,” said spokesman Judd Deere, adding that the task force hadn't "analyzed" the data yet. What Deere didn't say was that no such internal data existed—he only denied the modeling was a product of the White House. That's about as good as confirming the report.
What that means is that Donald Trump—through his depraved insistence on reopening the country—may actually be leading the nation straight into a slaughter worse than D-Day in 1944, when about 2,811 Americans perished at the outset of an Allied operation to liberate Nazi-occupied France and ultimately win World War II.
As Howell Raines, former executive editor of The New York Times, noted Monday on MSNBC, Trump's push to reopen goes way beyond incompetence and recklessness: "The policies that he's announcing and pursuing today for this hasty reopening, absent scientific evidence, are immoral," Raines said. "I'm reminded that thousands of Americans who are alive today will be dead by the end of the summer or by the end of the year because of this alteration in policy."
Raines acknowledged that, as president, life and death decisions are part of the job, recalling that Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew thousands of young soldiers would die on D-Day as part of the effort to defeat Nazi Germany.
But Trump’s pernicious push to reopen “means that we are looking at losing that many, close to 3,000, in a single day by the end of this month," Raines said. "FDR will be remembered for saying, 'You have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Harry S. Truman will be remembered in history for saying, 'The buck stops here.' This man is going to be remembered in history for saying 'You can inject Lysol.'"
Trump and Republicans led the country to slaughter earlier this year when they piddled away two months denying that COVID-19 would ever be a problem in the United States. Now Trump is leading the country into Phase II of his butchery. It's giving new meaning to the infamous Watergate-era phrase about the country's "long national nightmare." But it won't be over until Trump and his GOP accomplices have been destroyed in November and ejected from office.