Covfefe-19: is Donald Trump responsible?

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If Amazon or the pharmacies of Manhattan are any guide, buying a thermometer in America has become tricky, expensive or both — the Braun thermometer for which I paid some $60 shortly after the birth of our one-year-old was available online over the weekend for a modest $359.97. In confronting an epidemic data is, if not necessarily the first line of defence, very close behind it. Yet when it comes to testing for Covid-19, the US has been a laggard. On some estimates, fewer than 20,000 Americans had been tested by March 11. That’s around 23 per million, compared with a rate of 347 people per million in the UK.

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In 2020, Trump has everything to lose

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November 2020 is still a long way away, but it already looks as if the next presidential election will be lost not won.
It is not a given that America’s economy will hold up, but if it does, Donald Trump, as the incumbent, would normally have a good chance of hanging onto his job. However, “normally” is not a word that applies to a president forever a tweet, a fiasco or a past, present or future scandal away from disaster. Then there are the polls. Trump has had the lowest average approval ratings of any president since Gallup started measuring them in the 1930s, and he has yet to hit 50 per cent even once. He prevailed in 2016 with the smallest share of the popular vote (46.1 per cent) since a complicated four-way tussle in 1824.

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The Dementia Tax should have taught the Tories not to turn on their allies. But May’s government is at it again

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One ‘dementia tax’ ought to have been enough. The Conservatives were right to identify the cost of social care as an increasingly serious problem. Using their 2017 election manifesto to suggest a solution that was both unjust and likely to hit some of their most loyal supporters (or their children) the hardest was not, however, the way to go. The Tories made many mistakes in the course of that wretched campaign, but if there was one that set them on the path to a vanished majority, the dementia tax was probably it.

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