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Trump Using Students As Coronavirus Pawns

John Micek on

In guidelines posted to its website in May, the CDC had recommended, among other things, using cloth face coverings to halt the spread of respiratory droplets; regular cleaning and disinfecting, and modifying classroom layouts to keep students at least six feet apart where possible.

In other words, all the lessons that most Americans have internalized since the beginning the pandemic.

But as the Times further notes, Trump’s blustering comes “as scientists grapple with rising concerns about transmission of the virus in indoor spaces,”which most assuredly cramped school classrooms. In response, officials have been looking at alternatives.

In New York, for instance, classroom attendance will be limited to one to three days a week. And while it’s true that children aged 12 and younger are the least at risk for illness, there’s a concern that they could spread the virus to classmates and teachers, who would then bring it home to potentially vulnerable family members.

None of this matters to Trump, of course, whose callous indifference to the pandemic that’s now claimed 134,000 American lives, has been proven again and again, from predicting that the virus will just “disappear” to continuing to use a racially offensive epithet to describe it.

With his strongest political tool, the economy, taken away from him, and the American public breaking with the president on his racist defense of Confederate monuments and iconography, Trump needs a win someplace. And for reasons that, as usual, have only to do with his own self-preservation, he’s now using school children as pawns in a fight against Democrats that he’s most assuredly losing.

 

Bigly.

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Copyright 2020 John L. Micek, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek.


Copyright 2020 John Micek, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com

 

 

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