How Trump Closed Down the Schools

This article was updated on July 17 at 2:45pm.

Few things have captured Donald Trump’s fickle attention for long during the pandemic, but for the past 10 days, the president has been highly focused on one issue. He has insisted on the need for America’s schools to reopen in August with students in classrooms five days a week, hoping that this might revive the economy, and with it his reelection chances in November. It ought to be an easy sell, because polling shows that parents want their children in class and teachers want to be there too. But there’s a catch: They want to know it’s safe, and the federal government’s failure to manage the pandemic means many districts don’t think it is.

“His defiance of science has made it impossible to do what he wanted to do,” Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. “The irony is his incompetence and his arrogance and his refusal to listen to experts and his downplaying of the virus have made it impossible