Trump devastates Secret Service by refusing to take pandemic seriously

Donald Trump’s superspreader campaign rallies have wreaked havoc on the Secret Service, with more than 130 officers now either infected or in quarantine because of exposure to the coronavirus, according to a report from the Washington Post.

The outbreak in the ranks of the team meant to protect the president amounts to roughly 10% of the “core security team,” the Washington Post reported.

The news comes after Trump held multiple rallies across the country — including in states that were experiencing massive outbreaks — where both top Trump campaign officials, as well as the thousands of attendees, refused to wear masks or practice the social distancing that public health experts say slows the spread of the deadly virus.

Public health experts, as well as local officials where Trump held the rallies, begged him not to hold the rallies for fear of spreading the virus.

But Trump ignored those pleas, holding large events in the final weeks of the campaign in places like Wisconsin — which now is experiencing a public health crisis as cases rise and hospitals are run out of beds to treat virus patients.

Meanwhile, a Stanford University study found that Trump’s rallies led to more than 30,000 cases of the virus in the country from June to September.

Trump, for his part, has refused to take the coronavirus seriously from the start, publicly downplaying its dangers — despite knowing how deadly and contagious it was.

Trump has claimed that the virus would simply disappear, despite experts saying the exact opposite.

And in the final days of the campaign, he insisted that the virus was a media-driven ploy to hurt his reelection campaign, saying the media would stop covering the pandemic after Election Day.

“We have made tremendous progress with the China Virus, but the Fake News refuses to talk about it this close to the Election. COVID, COVID, COVID is being used by them, in total coordination, in order to change our great early election numbers. Should be an election law violation!” Trump tweeted on Oct. 26.

That, too, was not true.

The virus is currently spreading uncontrollably across almost the entirety of the United States, according to the CovidExitStrategy.com tracker, with the increases setting new records daily.

“Over the past week, there has been an average of 134,078 cases per day, an increase of 72% from the average two weeks earlier,” according to the New York Times’ coronavirus tracker.

Another 1,172 people died from the virus on Thursday, bringing the total number of virus deaths in the country to 242,861, the New York Times reported.

That’s above the worst-case scenario of deaths Trump predicted the country would see.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.