If Joe Biden is right about 1 thing, it's Trump's handling of the pandemic


On the final night of the Democratic National Convention, Joe Biden presented the most obvious and convincing case against President Trump — the undeniable fact that if Trump wins re-election, America will remain in the coronavirus sandpit. "Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died," said Biden. "This president, if he's re-elected, you know what will happen: cases and deaths will remain far too high. More mom-and-pop businesses will close their doors, and this time for good." Yup.
For the first time at the DNC, Biden emphasized that there will be no economic recovery until the pandemic is controlled, and America is an international laughingstock. "We will never get our economy back on track, we will never get our kids safely back in schools, we will never have our lives back, until we deal with this virus," he said, correctly. "The tragedy of where we are today is that it didn't have to be this bad. Just look around — it's not this bad in Canada, or Europe, or Japan, or almost anywhere else in the world." Biden then outlined a sketch of a plan to contain the virus: a rapid build-out of containment systems, putting scientists back at the forefront of federal messaging, a national mandate for mask-wearing in public, and so forth.
It remains to be seen whether a President Biden would effectively follow through on these promises. But it is simply inarguable that he is correct about Trump. Our current president is a miserable failure, and if he wins re-election Americans are going to continue to suffer horribly.
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Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.
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