US President Donald Trump. (File photo: AP)
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump reportedly considered allowing the coronavirus pandemic to “wash over” America last month even as the death toll from Covid-19 infections in the US neared 21000 on Sunday, the highest among all countries but significantly less than what was feared. Infections across the country continued to rise beyond half a million, and for the first time in American history, all 50 states were declared disaster zones eligible for federal help despite the overall sense that the worst may be over in terms of deaths — if mitigation measures hold.
But accounts of a President who was warned repeatedly in the first three months of the year of the upcoming pandemic crisis in the face of his reluctance to lock down the country and its economy abounded in the liberal US media that Trump has repeatedly excoriated as the “enemy of the people.” Both the New York Times and Washington Post, Trump’s bête-noires, carried startling stories of a President who remained stonily indifferent to warnings from a range of experts, many of whom exchanged worried emails about the growing crisis even as the virus spread across America.
In one of the more astonishing accounts, Trump reportedly asked Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert an