Trump Turned the Death Count Into a Story About Himself
How many dead? Only after the coronavirus had claimed more than 60,000 lives—Donald Trump’s previous estimate for how many Americans might die—did the president acknowledge that the toll could rise to 100,000. The projections keep changing, and the question of whether authorities are even counting correctly looms ever larger. The United States has a duty to make an accurate tally, and not just because Americans need to know how many people to grieve.
Why do people die? This isn’t just a philosophical or religious question. For crisis-response experts, it also has tactical implications. Why did person die, while person didn’t? Attributing a fatality to an earthquake, hurricane, or some other catastrophe explains only so much, because people experiencing these events do
