10-23-2020

By J. Noel Espinoza/riograndeinfo

Commentary

With less than two weeks to choose the next president of the United States and nearly four years of discord and rampant misinformation from the current White House tenant, there is no better choice right now than to elect former Vice-President Joe Biden.

Despite losing the popular vote, President Donald J. Trump’s outsider campaign four years ago catapulted him to lead the nation under the slogan of “Make America Great Again.” However, the country today is worse off and so polarized that even the notion of breaking itself apart isn’t far off the charts.

It’s not just the politics of immigration, racism, and social justice that Mr. Trump has bungled from the beginning of his administration, but also the simple notion of dealing with a pandemic such as Covid-19 that has taken its tolls (more than 222,000 deaths so far) after ignoring the advice of the scientific community or following the model of other countries to manage the spread of the disease. Among the industrialized nations, the United States government is failing in the management of the pandemic and the main culprit is Mr. Trump.

Instead of leading by example and paying attention to the experts, Mr. Trump habitual leadership is to blame others, deny the obvious, and exaggerate his endeavors.

Despite the public’s priority to bring the pandemic under control, the president instead mocks people for wearing masks, an action that has helped other countries to keep the Coronavirus under control. Recklessly, Mr. Trump exposes his base to large political gatherings, something that could put the health of everyone in jeopardy.

With the pandemic still in full swing, millions of people have lost their jobs and consequently their health insurance if they had it to begin with.

Since the beginning of his administration, Mr. Trump promised better health care than Obamacare, but so far no one knows where his plan is, while he continues to promise after nearly four years that he has a better one.

Mr. Trump’s base mainly made up of right-wing extremists and religious zealots that were on the fringes of society in the past, now casually voice their bigotry in plain view for everyone to see without care since they believe often that local police authorities and the president himself would support such idiocies.

Let’s remember, Mr. Trump was also able to win by a dubious element known as the electoral college which no other nation known as democratic uses, but it’s a vestige of the history of racism that still permeates throughout the nation. Anyone with a clear vision and a basic understanding of compassion would pick Mr. Biden, a politician who’s not perfect but who has a sense of sympathy for the less fortunate rather than the mockery Mr. Trump usually displays for the less privileged masses.