Is Trump Responsible For Making Nursing Homes More Unsafe?

The industry was one of his first targets for deregulation, and he’s been on quite a tear…

Residents and workers at nursing homes or similar long-term care facilities currently make up almost 1/3 of all Coronavirus deaths in the U.S., according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 28,000 people. And the New York Times suggests that’s probably low, since reporting of that data in many cases is still incomplete or not publicly available. We all know by now COVID-19 poses the greatest danger to older people. Still, those numbers are staggering.

At the same time, the White House has only just suggested — not yet mandated — that all nursing home residents in the U.S. get tested within the next two weeks. Although in a lesser heeded (and heated) moment during the President’s instantly infamous Rose Garden news conference this week, Trump told an Associated Press reporter who asked him about nursing home testing that he’d mandate it “if you’d like”, but then almost instantly shifted gears to place all responsibility and blame on governors, saying:

“I think, frankly, some of the governors were very lax with respect to nursing homes. It was obvious right from the beginning. The State of Washington, where 26 or 28 people died very early…