Stephen Collinson: “More pillars are fast crumbling in President Donald Trump’s frantic and lie-strewn attempt to convince Americans the nation is back to normal before the election, with chaos already afflicting the return to school and a rite of fall — college football — on the brink.”

“Trump’s false insistence that children are ‘immune’ from the coronavirus and can’t spread it is being undermined by new figures showing that nearly 100,000 kids tested positive for the virus in the last two weeks of July. And some of the first schools that are following his calls to fully reopen are being hit by new viral outbreaks almost as soon as classes begin. The President, in demanding a return to class and for college football to kick off, is making education and collegiate sports the latest area of American life to be contaminated by his false narratives about the pandemic. Almost all of his assurances about the crisis — which have tended to minimize its impact and ignore science — have proven to be wrong. First Trump said the pandemic would not take hold of the United States, but it did. Then he said it would simply disappear and it didn’t. Then the President said it was safe to open state economies before the pathogen was fully under control — steps which helped cause a viral eruption across southern and western states. He’s argued against all the principles of epidemiology that testing doesn’t matter — even though nations that have done better than the US have used that route to get the virus under control. Last week, Trump said that there might be a vaccine before Election Day in another self-serving political comment. Now firms developing the inoculation and experts say that’s likely impossible.”