A ‘staggering’ remark has revealed the truth about Trump’s new 2020 strategy: columnist

Writing in the Washington Post this Monday, Phillip Bump says that it's becoming increasingly clear that a considerable portion of President Trump's reelection strategy is to shrug off the coronavirus pandemic.

According to Bump, one indicator of this strategy manifested itself in a question from CNN's Jim Acosta to a White House official over the lack of social distancing during Trump's RNC acceptance speech. “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually,” the official reportedly said.

"It’s a staggering comment, for a variety of reasons," Bump writes. "The most obvious is that everyone won’t catch the novel coronavirus eventually, ideally; the point of developing a vaccine is to keep that from happening. What’s more, even if there were no vaccine, there’s a big difference between people catching it now and catching it in a year or two when there might be better therapeutic treatments or potentially a cure. It’s like shrugging at people getting infections before the invention of penicillin."

Trump has also repeatedly downplayed the risks of contracting the virus by suggesting that almost all infections are "totally harmless" -- a claim that "both misrepresents the deadliness of the virus and ignores the body of evidence showing that some infections yield long-term health effects and potentially permanent damage," Bump writes.

Ultimately, this shift in strategy could result in more widespread infections and thousands more deaths, according to Bump.

Read the full article over at The Washington Post.