The Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue
Trump is the kind of boss who cant do the job and wont go away.
Every workers nightmare is the horrible boss everyone knows at least one who is utterly incompetent yet refuses to step aside. Such bosses have the reverse Midas touch everything they handle turns to crud but theyll pull out every stop, violate every norm, to stay in that corner office. And they damage, sometimes destroy, the institutions theyre supposed to lead.
Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses. Unfortunately, hes not just a bad business executive. He is, God help us, the president. And the institution he may destroy is the United States of America.
Has any previous president failed his big test as thoroughly as Trump has these past few months? He rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war.
The result has been disaster both epidemiological and economic.
Over the past week the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 averaged more than 1,000 people a day, compared with just four four! per day in Germany. Vice President Mike Pences mid-June declaration that There isnt a coronavirus second wave felt like whistling in the dark even at the time; now it feels like a sick joke.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/trump-coronavirus-economy.html