, Columnist
For a Germaphobe, Trump Is Pretty Bad at Fighting Viruses
The president isn’t to blame for the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S., but he hasn’t been making things better lately.
More charts, less talk.
Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The coronavirus epidemic is not President Donald Trump’s fault. Neither is the stock market’s decline, or the economic downturn that seems increasingly likely to follow in its wake.
What’s more, with many of the big decisions on how to slow the disease’s spread in the hands of state and local officials, a U.S. president’s role in such a crisis is limited. The regime in Tehran may have enabled the onset of a full-on national pandemic in Iran with its denial and inaction. That would be harder for any White House, however incompetent or misguided, to accomplish.