How green with envy is Donald Trump?
President Biden has him begging for attention.
Since Biden’s inauguration, the COVID-19 infection rate has been cut by well over half.
And last week congressional Democrats passed Biden’s popular COVID-19 relief bill. The economy is rebounding, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up about 19 percent since Election Day.
Poor Trump. All he can do is put out a whiny statement.
“I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you would be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!”
We remember the shortage of vaccine when he left office.
We remember there was no plan for getting Americans vaccinated.
And who can forget that Trump lied from the start about the severity of the virus and later promoted a quack, phony cure?
The bottom line is that he produced the greatest failure of presidential leadership in history.
In January, Trump’s last month in the White House, the nation had the highest number of COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began. Shortly after he left office, the virus death toll topped 500,000.
With Biden in the White House, the nation has turned that around in 50 days.
COVID-19 infection rates and deaths are sharply down while the number of people getting shots has more than doubled to over 2 million a day.
Biden promised 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days in office. He is on track to do it.
And now Biden says there will be enough vaccine for all Americans by the end of May.
Trump and his aides are reduced to complaining that Biden’s team is “using our playbook every step of the way.” They correctly note that Trump got vaccine production started. But people outside of politics say there is no comparing the administrations.
“Corporate, state and federal officials agree Mr. Biden’s White House has been more active than his predecessor’s in trying to build up the nation’s vaccine stock,” The New York Times reported last week.
The American public agrees.
Biden’s approval rate was 60 percent last week in both a CBS poll and a Morning Consult-Politico poll.
Trump left office in January with a 34 percent approval rating, according to Gallup. He is the only president who never reached a 50 percent approval rating in a Gallup poll.
Biden’s COVID-19 aid bill is also a winner with public opinion.
Despite not a single Republican in Congress supporting the bill, the Biden coronavirus relief package won approval from both Republican and Democratic voters.
In the Morning Consult poll, 75 percent of the nation supported Biden’s $1.9 trillion package. Even 59 percent of Republicans supported the bill, the poll found.
Just as importantly, Americans are happy with Biden’s response to the pandemic, with more than 60 percent approving, according to polling by NPR, CBS and Pew Research.
Oh, and this has to burn Trump:
In the NPR poll, Biden’s handling of the virus got the approval of 22 percent of people who say they voted for Trump. Overall, about one-third of Republicans approved.
Biden’s positive poll ratings on handling the virus are almost the exact opposite of Trump’s. In October, a month before the election, 59 percent of Americans disapproved of how Trump was dealing with it, according to a Reuters poll.
Trump’s own pollster said the negative public reaction to Trump’s approach to the virus cost him the November election.
Tony Fabrizio, his top pollster, said the coronavirus was the top issue in the presidential contest. A majority of voters who ranked the virus as the top issue disapproved of how Trump handled the crisis. Fabrizio found those voters favored Biden by a margin close to 3 to 1.
It is a rule of politics that in any crisis there is a rally-around-the-leader surge in public support. But Trump’s response to the COVID-19 crisis was so bad that his approval numbers went down.
A year ago, Trump gave an Oval office speech to the nation in which he said “the risk is very, very low” that the virus was a threat to kill a large number of Americans.
Now, Trump insists on credit for starting vaccine production. But he has nothing more to contribute about dealing with the fallout from the pandemic.
At the moment, most of his statements are attacks on Republicans he views as not loyal to him.
In one statement, he ridiculed Republican political strategist Karl Rove as a man who “has been losing for years, except for himself.”
In another statement, Trump trashed the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page. He said the Journal’s editorial support for moderate Republicans had “so badly hurt the Republican Party,” adding, “Fortunately, nobody cares much about The Wall Street Journal editorial anymore.”
In yet another statement, Trump asked his supporters to send their political donations to his political action committee and not to the Republican National Committee.
Trump will get his wish to be remembered. He will be remembered for his jealous rage.
Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
Via The Hill