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The US wasn't able to fully and safely reopen in April. It isn't able to fully and safely reopen in August.


The virus rages on, affecting every aspect of American life, from the economy to education to entertainment. Nearly 180,000 Americans are dead. Schools are closing down again after botched attempts to reopen, with outbreaks in universities and K-12 settings. America now has one of the worst ongoing epidemics in the world, with the most daily new cases and deaths, after controlling for population, among the developed countries.


As fall approaches, in-person teaching is back in parts of Europe, fans are returning to baseball stadiums in Taiwan and South Korea, and dine-in reservations have jumped to previous years' levels in Germany - while many states in the US are scaling back their already limited reopenings as the disease spreads.

The Easter episode, experts said, exemplified the magical thinking that has animated Trump's response to the COVID-19 pandemic before and after the novel coronavirus reached the US. It's a problem that's continued through August - with Trump and those under him recently denying the existence of a resurgence in COVID-19, falsely claiming rising cases were a result of more tests. With every day, week, and month that the Trump administration has tried to spin a positive story, it's also resisted stronger action, allowing the epidemic to drag on.


A pandemic was always likely to be a challenge for the US, given the country's large size, fragmented federalist system, and libertarian streak. The public health system was already underfunded and underprepared for a major disease outbreak before Trump.


Yet many other developed countries dealt with these kinds of problems too. Public health systems are notoriously underfunded worldwide. Australia, Canada, and Germany, among others, also have federalist systems of government, individualistic societies, or both.


Instead, experts said, it's Trump's leadership, or lack thereof, that really sets the US apart. Before COVID-19, Trump and his administration undermined preparedness - eliminating a White House office set up by the previous administration to combat pandemics, making cuts across other key parts of the federal government, and proposing further cuts.


Once the coronavirus arrived, Trump downplayed the threat, suggesting it would soon disappear "like a miracle." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took weeks to fix botched tests, and the administration actively abdicated control of issues to local, state, and private actors.


"There was a failure to realize what an efficiently spreading respiratory virus for which we have no vaccine and no antiviral meant," Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. "From the very beginning, that minimization ... set a tone that reverberated from the highest levels of government to what the average person believes about the virus."



A few other developed countries - including Belgium, France, and Italy - were caught off-guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and were hit hard early, suffering massive early outbreaks with enormous death tolls. But after those outbreaks, these countries and those around them generally took COVID-19 seriously: implementing lengthy and strict lockdowns, widespread testing and contact tracing, masking mandates, and consistent public messaging about the virus.


The US did not, even after an outbreak spiraled out of control in New York. It was this failure to act even after a major epidemic, and a continued failure to implement stronger measures as other large outbreaks occurred, that makes the US unique.


"If George W. Bush had been president, if John McCain had been president, if Mitt Romney had been president, this would have looked very different," Ashish Jha, the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told me, emphasizing the failure to act after COVID-19 hit the US hard was a phenomenon exclusive to Trump.


Experts worry that things will again get worse: Colder weather is coming, forcing people back into risky indoor environments. So are holiday celebrations, when families and friends will gather from across the country. Another flu season looms. And Trump, experts lamented, is still not ready to do much, if anything, about it.

Trump's magical thinking couldn't beat COVID-19, America is stuck with the consequences