50,000

Sometime yesterday, an important milepost was silently passed — the 50,000th victim of coronavirus died in the United States.

And Donald Trump said utterly nothing about it. The same way he said nothing about the 40,000th victim. Or the 30,000th victim. And on and on and on.

That's because he rarely mentions death in his all-is-nearly-well daily self-congratulatory media appearances. If he mentions mortality, it's to claim, without a shred of evidence, that hundreds of thousand or millions of Americans would have died if it were not for him.

The always wise Susan Glasser wrote an excellent piece about this on Thursday (link here) in the New Yorker. Trump has endless amounts of time to talk about himself. He has almost no amount of time to talk about the dead.

Is that because he recognizes that many of those thousands died because he grossly mismanaged the response to the coronavirus threat? Or is he such a narcissist he can't even bother to notice?

One should also note that two months ago to this day there were no deaths yet from coronavirus. The first occurred on February 29. So much has changed in the last sixty days.

As well, the highest number of new cases was reported yesterday — nearly 39,000. We are nowhere near out of the woods yet.