Nearly one third of Americans who rent their homes, or 13. 4 million people, did not pay their rent between April 1 and April 5 this month.
Requests from homeowners to delay making their monthly mortgage payments surged by over 2,000 percent between March 16 and March 30.
Historian Jon Meacham said that Trump's coronavirus briefings aren't informative, but they are infomercials intended to sell his response to the virus.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said that a combination of arrogance, hubris, and mismanagement is why the US lacks adequate coronavirus testing.
Citing words from an influential businessman, Trump suggested on Sunday afternoon that the poor response to coronavirus in the United States wasn’t his administration’s fault, but that of Congress’.
“Great businessman & philanthropist Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of Home Depot, said that Congress was too distracted by the (phony) Impeachment Witch Hunt when they should have been investigating CoronaVirus when it first appeared in China,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “Media played a big roll [sic] also!”
Trump’s criticism matched what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a radio interview in late March. Coronavirus “came up while we were tied down in the impeachment trial,” he claimed then. “And I think it diverted the attention of the government because everything every day was all about impeachment.”
Great businessman & philanthropist Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of Home Depot, said that Congress was too distracted by the (phony) Impeachment Witch Hunt when they should have been investigating CoronaVirus when it first appeared in China. Media played a big roll also!@dcexaminer
Most Americans by now agree that President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been disastrous, or at the very least, sorely lacking.
A majority, 51 percent, disapprove of the response his administration has had in handling the spread of the disease in the U.S., with 46 percent approving, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll.
In other polls, Trump saw an increase in his approval rating on the issue in mid-March, but those numbers have dipped as people start to realize this president is in way over his head on the issue.
There are many ways to measure a president’s success rate (or failure rate, for that matter) when it comes to how they react to a crisis. But by Trump’s own standards, he’s been a failure.
Trump has tried to compare himself to his predecessor on many occasions during his tenure, and coronavirus is no different. Early in March, the current president tried to say former President Barack Obama had done a worse job than him in dealing with a similar crisis in 2009 — the H1N1 pandemic, otherwise known as Swine Flu.
On coronavirus response per Quinnipiac:
* Fauci: 78% approve, 7% disapprove
* Your state's governor: 74/24
* Cuomo: 59/17
* Trump: 46/51
* Congress: 44/46https://t.co/fgyuTrifDy— Amy Siskind 🏳️🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) April 8, 2020
On March 13, Trump described Obama’s (and by proxy, former Vice President Joe Biden’s) response to that disease as a “full scale disaster” due to thousands who died of the disease. More recently on April 7, Trump described how 17,000 deaths from Swine Flu was a “debacle” for the previous administration.
Those numbers, it should be pointed out, are inaccurate: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that only about 12,500 Americans died of the Swine Flu, not 17,000.
Most Americans, too, gave Obama good marks on his administration’s response to the disease — six months after the pandemic reached the U.S., nearly 6-in-10 Americans said they approved of how the Obama White House handled things.
The current president does himself no favors by bringing up Obama’s response, particularly because the American people were, for the most part, happy with it, and are currently unhappy with Trump’s. Additionally, if the standard for a “debacle” of a response is the number of deaths that have occurred, Trump has admitted he has done poorly in his own crisis.
Over 20,000 Americans have so far died of coronavirus, according to numbers from Johns Hopkins University as of 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Sunday. That number is expected to triple by the end of August — and that estimate is only if social distancing measures remain in place until that time.
On Feb 26, @realDonaldTrump bragged we only had 15 cases and we were "going to be down close to zero soon."
On April 12, we have 530,000+ cases and 20,600+ deaths.
For months, Trump lied and downplayed this crisis and cost us valuable time – and lives.pic.twitter.com/MoFd8QiCs9
One can find in the media many important analyses and accounts of the way the coronavirus pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the myriad inequities plaguing U.S. society.
The most opulent among us can shelter in place and not have to worry about their next paycheck, about being evicted, about having enough food. They don’t have to choose between staying safe and risking their lives by going to work.
