Dear Editor,

As President Donald J. Trump is currently very aggressively engaged in a very vigorous campaign to attempt to place the responsibility/blame for the coronavirus pandemic tragedy in the United States on China as well as others, how is it explained that we, the greatest nation in the world, with the finest medical professionals and resources are, and long have been, the very epicenter of this global disaster, even though the vast majority of other nations were confronted by the deadly pandemic earlier than we were. Now, sadly, the United States of America, with 4.2% of the world’s population, has over 29% of the world’s deaths due to the coronavirus, with more than 1.7 million positive cases and over 101,000 deaths, and counting, which is unfortunately significantly more than the four next so-impacted nations, namely Russia, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Spain combined?

The lion’s share of the responsibility for the horrific impact COVID-19 has had on our great nation lies, I feel, with President Trump, as he refused to heed the warnings of professionals, flippantly rejecting the potential impact on us by statements such as one that “It is no worse than the common flu,” “37,000 Americans died from the flu every day and nothing is shut down,” and referring to the pandemic, incredibly, as a “Democratic hoax,” while at the same time praising his current scapegoat, China, for their “transparency and cooperation,” and in large part as a result, we as a nation were perhaps the only country in the world to not take a positive, early-on, proactive approach, as did literally all other nations, in combating this dreaded pandemic. That had catastrophic consequences.

Also, most troubling is the fact that numerous high-ranking health care professionals, including Rick Bright, who had been the director of the federal office overseeing COVID-19 vaccine development, and Christy Grimm, the acting inspector general at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and numerous others, attempted to warn the American people of the impending disaster, but that was contrary to the cavalier attitude of the president and his administration in response to this great crisis.

Obviously, President Trump demands total loyalty of government employees to him, even if such may cost the lives of countless Americans.

In addition, how is it that President Trump has placed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of the White House response to the coronavirus threat? Kushner has absolutely no expertise in such matters, and recently, the president’s son, Eric Trump, stated on Fox News that the precautions that have been taken by our nation during the current crisis were “a strategy employed by the Democrats in order to prevent President Trump from holding campaign rallies and that such restrictions would be lifted immediately following the November election.”

It appears that young Mr. Trump is as out of touch and devoid of human empathy as his self-aggrandizing, greatly uninformed and grossly incompetent father.

In spite of all this, I remain optimistic that, hopefully sooner rather than later, we as a nation will most successfully emerge from this most disastrous epoch in the history of our great nation.

Richard Hord

Martins Ferry