Comment: Trump's majestic plan to tame coronavirus woes -- seize new planets

Comment: Trump's majestic plan to tame coronavirus woes -- seize new planets

As coronavirus pandemic started to overwhelm nations, US President Donald Trump had labelled himself a “wartime president” on March 18, reassuring Americans that a victory was imminent.

Three weeks later, the US accounts for 30 per cent of all coronavirus cases in the world.

The Trump administration had received its first formal notification about the threat coronavirus posed on January 3, long before the contagion assumed catastrophic proportions across the Atlantic.

But instead of employing stringent measures as advised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and his own team of experts -– to produce and distribute test kits and essential protective gear, to help states to add more hospital beds, and recruit more healthcare workers – Donald Trump did the unthinkable: he waited.

He tweeted and taunted and soon, the “enemy”, which Trump had until then deemed "invisible", was unmistakably in their midst and wreaking havoc.

Nearly 404,056 people have been infected in the United States since then and over 12,988 lives have been lost to coronavirus – which Trump had on occasions also termed “Chinese virus”. 

This is four times the number of deaths in China, where the virus first emerged.

Now, as cases rise and a section of the US media label him as the worst president in US history, Donald Trump has once again outdone himself: with an ambitious plan to seize other planets, or so Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, claims.

Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order that creates the basis to take over other planets by way of commercial mining in space.

The order empowers the US to seek arrangements with foreign states regarding safe and sustainable operations for the public and private recovery and use of space resources. 

It states that the US does not view space as a “global commons”.

This puts the US in confrontation with global bodies who have all collectively agreed to the notion of space belonging to all humanity.

"Attempts to expropriate outer space and aggressive plans to seize territories of other planets hardly set the countries (on course for) fruitful cooperation," Roscosmos said in a statement.

Co-operation on space experiments provided a common platform for the US and Russia, burying their deep cold war hostilities. 

Any kind of attempt to privatise space in one form or another is certain to irk the Kremlin.

With coronavirus already dabbling in Russian terrain, an angry Putin is certainly one thing the US could do without right now.

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