May 17, 2020

As US Death Toll Nears 90,000, Trump Says We’re “Doing Really Well”

(Plague!)

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting about the coronavirus response with Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, April 30, 2020, in Washington. Associated Press

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With the United States death toll from COVID-19 approaching 90,000 and former President Barack Obama criticizing the federal government’s response, there’s at least one person who thinks things are actually going quite well: Donald Trump.

On Sunday, the president tweeted, “Doing REALLY well, medically, on solving the CoronaVirus situation (Plague!). It will happen!”

It’s not entirely clear what “it” means in this context, but it seems likely that the pandemic is here to stay for the foreseeable future. There are more than 100 vaccines in development globally, and only eight have started testing in humans, according to the Wall Street Journal. Trump tweeted last week that “vaccine work is looking VERY promising, before end of year. Likewise, other solutions!” Moncef Slaoui, who’s leading the US government’s effort to develop a vaccine, said in an interview with the New York Times that “12-18 months [from when work first began] is already a very aggressive timeline” but that the president’s goal was achievable. Other government experts are more skeptical.

Trump’s Sunday tweet comes one day after the Food and Drug Administration issued emergency clearance for an at-home coronavirus testing kit, but even that positive development comes with caveats. Users would still have to send their test samples to a laboratory for diagnostic testing in order to get a result. In fact, far from solving the crisis, the administration’s testing efforts are still failing to reveal a clear picture of the pandemic’s scope. Supply shortages have hampered efforts to ramp up testing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its own numbers recently, announcing that 1.4 million people have tested positive among the more than 10 million tested. But those number differ from what individual states have found. Take California, for example, which says it’s done more than 1.3 million tests, while the CDC counted just under 925,000.

Trump’s rhetoric once again seems to be at odds with the data. And while that’s certainly not a new development, the pandemic has made it far more dangerous.

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From the desk of Mother Jones CEO, Monika Bauerlein...

Newsrooms can be funded in many ways. One of the most controversial (and volatile) ways is by a for-profit corporation or a billionaire owner. We see it across the headlines on a weekly basis: the claw backs in public media, the gutting of The Washington Post, the bending over backwards to appeal to Trump and his allies.

But not here.

When Mother Jones first started publishing 50 years ago, our founders made a critical decision: to be a reader-supported nonprofit. They knew that no corporate owner would be interested in a muckraking newsroom; they also knew that no muckraking newsroom would be interested in following the agenda of a corporate owner.

And so, we’ve been reader-funded for half a century. We rely on contributions from our readers—readers like you—whether it’s $50, or $15 a month, or whatever fits your budget. People give what they can, and every donation makes a difference for our newsroom, which has grown tremendously—in size and reach and renown—since its inception in 1976.

You may be wondering: What does it take to publish an investigation? And what does my donation actually fund? The answers are one and the same: It takes people, resources, and time. And that’s what your donation funds directly.

Every donation Mother Jones receives from readers fortifies our newsroom, whether we’re covering underreported scandals out of Washington, DC, or the most important news of the day. And right now, each donation will be doubled because of our $50,000 match. So when you make a donation—$5, $50, any amount—it’ll go twice as far.

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