BESIDES being the first president to get impeached twice, Donald Trump will have a stain on his legacy with arguably longer-lasting consequences: He’s about to become the only American leader in a century with more than 400,000 deaths from one event on his watch.
The USA is expected to cross that somber threshold soon, likely by Monday, yet another reminder of how poorly the nation with the world’s largest economy has fared during the coronavirus pandemic. The current COVID-19 death toll is about 396,000.
Not since Woodrow Wilson was in office during the 1918 flu pandemic – which killed about 675,000 in this country and 50 million worldwide – had a president overseen the loss of so many American lives.
That total is fast approaching the 405,000 U.S. fatalities from World War II – thousands of them recorded when Harry Truman was president after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in April 1945 – to rank as the third-deadliest
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