Maskless: How the coronavirus came back to bite Trump (IANS Analysis)

By Nikhila Natarajan New York, Oct 2 : The mask has slipped. US president Donald Trump will now forever be part of America’s grim coronavirus caseload statistics – 7.2 million and rising, the world’s largest.
Thirty days before the US 2020 elections, Trump has been diagnosed with the Coronavirus, tossing his plans for the final political push into chaos. The man who urged his supporters to come in droves to super-spreader events and pushed states to “REOPEN!” is now quarantining while civil society struggles to find ways to get back to work and school in the absence of a single overriding health communication goal from the White House.
With vaccine availability at scale at least a few months away, how we absorb the new developments must necessarily begin by looking in the rear-view mirror. How did America get to this place, with 209,000 dead from the virus which has blasted through even the impressive armour of White House security cover? To understand how we got here, we must go back to when Trump knew but we did not, because those known unknowns have been a signature of the American response to the worst public health crisis in modern history.
The charade played out even the night before Trump’s positive diagnosis. The US president told his admirers, “I just want to say that the end of the pandemic is in sight, and next year will be one of the greatest years in the history of our country.” Exactly 24 hours later, the virus story came full circle. Trump and the First Lady announced they would quarantine.