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Joe Biden’s First Inaugural Event Highlights Failure Of Trump’s COVID-19 Response
WASHINGTON — Just a half-mile from where President Donald Trump is spending his final night in the White House, twin rows of lights on the National Mall marked the first inaugural event of his successor — an implicit rebuke of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the 400,000 Americans it has already killed.
At 5:33 p.m., 400 rectangular lights — each representing a thousand Americans dead of COVID-19 — lit up on either side of the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument as bells at the National Cathedral rang 400 times. The scene was set to repeat all over the country, with structures from the Empire State Building in New York City to the Space Needle in Seattle lighting up and bells ringing to honor the dead.
“To heal, we must remember,” Biden said in brief remarks. “It’s important to do that as a nation.”
Trump’s failure to ramp up testing production or to exhort Americans to take measures to slow the disease’s spread has likely already caused 200,000 more Americans to die than might have. Germany, for example, which has an equally advanced health care infrastructure but whose leader took the virus seriously, has suffered 579 deaths per million people, while the United States has suffered 1,220 deaths per million as of Tuesday.
Trump, though, has instead claimed for nearly a full year that he’s done a tremendous job, and only occasionally mentioned in passing the Americans who have died. He did that again in a taped 20-minute “farewell address” he released Tuesday. “We grieve for every life lost, and we pledge in their memory to wipe out this horrible pandemic once and for all,” Trump said.
He began his COVID-19 response a year ago by denying that one was even necessary. Trump’s first public remarks on the matter came on Jan. 22, 2020, when he claimed he had stopped the virus from coming into the country at all. In the coming weeks, he claimed it was like a cold, and not as severe...
