An infectious grin

Trump, smiling, sat with experts in the West Wing and said he's doing the best job any president in history ever did at preventing a covid-19 epidemic. He encouraged people to go to work since few of them would be really sick. He told us that the experts had overestimated the fatality rate.

It would be comic were it not so tragic. His motives in ignoring expert advice to make assertions based on his own flawed hunches are unclear. It may be that he wants to prevent a panic; perhaps he wants to stop the slide in the stock market; perhaps we wants to ensure that GDP remains on track. Or it could be another example of Dunning-Kruger.  Whatever the explanation, he clearly has little interest in at-risk individuals' health, nor an understanding of the mechanisms of the viruses' spread.

It is notable that individual deaths allegedly at the hands of immigrants are splashed across Fox as a BIG DEAL, yet the casual causing of hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, by misleading people about covid-19, in his and Fox's view, is just a case of it can't be helped; 'shit happens'. There should be a private corner in Hell for Trump, the GOP and Fox.