With the number of covid-19 cases in the United States having risen above three hundred, and the number of cases around the world now topping a hundred thousand, Donald Trump is spending the weekend hosting Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing President of Brazil, at his private beach resort in Florida. On Friday night, Trump announced that Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, was leaving the position, and would be replaced by Mark Meadows, a conservative congressman from North Carolina who has been one of the President’s staunchest defenders on Capitol Hill. In other circumstances, the shakeup would be a major story. But, much to Trump’s chagrin, the spread of the coronavirus is increasingly dominating all other news.
Public concern about the spread of the coronavirus is rising, with officials from New York and other cities complaining about a chronic lack of test kits from the federal government. On Saturday, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state had been running its own tests “around the clock.” He announced that the total of confirmed cases in the state had risen to seventy-six and declared a state of emergency.
Trump, meanwhile, evidently decided that the situation isn’t serious enough to keep him in Washington. From the beginning, he has sought to minimize the seriousness of the emerging epidemic, and he is still at it. That’s when he’s not praising himself for how he and the U.S. government have responded to the crisis or offering himself as an expert. During a remarkable press conference at the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Friday, Trump mentioned an uncle who had taught science at M.I.T. and said, “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done this instead of running for President.” Continue reading.