Not By Accident

President Donald Trump has a plan. It's a plan for the old people, especially ones in elder care facilities; for the elderly; for individuals with underlying health conditions, especially compromised immune systems.  We learned Monday from The New York Times

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.

The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.

Of course it will. But for Donald Trump, that is not a bug but a benefit.  It is why, as Illinois governor JB Pritzker pointed out four weeks ago "what the White House has done is created—you know, they call this the air bridge, where they're bringing stuff back from China to the United States, and then they're delivering it to private companies in the United States, not to the states."

It is why that after he was warned throughout January and February (maybe learning as early as November) in daily briefing papers and digests from the Office of the DNI and the CIA about the coronavirus, President Trump fifteen times from January 22 through February 29 praised mainland China for its handling of the pandemic.

And now it is why that as he is being told it is likely that deaths from Covid-19 are likely to surge over the next few weeks, the President is urging governors to reopen their states, thus helping to make that projection a reality.

The individuals most likely to die are those whom Donald Trump has never preferred to live.  "This is where luck comes in," Trump said in 1988, "you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes to go out and if it's in my business, if it's making deals...."

So many people don't have the "right genes," especially among the approximately 70,000 Americans who thus far have succumbed to SARS-CoV-2.  Donald Trump has a plan. Thus far, it is being executed nearly flawlessly.

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