Pelosi accuses the Duce and his supporters of what they openly advocate

It's all in the spin.

Spun one way it's a shocking crime against the American people. Spun another, it's realistic defense of their best interests, in net.

Well, not quite all.

Lurking not very far in the background are differing guesses at the net damage done by the spread of the disease on the one side and measures to slow or limit it on the other.

Pelosi accuses Trump of costing US lives with coronavirus denials and delays

Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, delivered a devastating critique of Donald Trump on Sunday, accusing the president directly of costing American lives through his constant denials and delays in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

“The president’s denial at the beginning was deadly,” the House Speaker told CNN’s State of the Union. 

“His delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly … As the president fiddles, people are dying.”

More than 2,000 Covid-19 deaths had been confirmed in the US by Sunday morning, among about 125,000 confirmed cases, the most in any country.

Asked if she was saying Trump’s early downplaying of the severity of the coronavirus crisis had “cost American lives”, Pelosi replied: “Yes I am. I’m saying that.”

The rightwing figures pushing Trump's 'back-to-work' policy despite pandemic

As Donald Trump has pushed his shock policy reversal to try to soon get many Americans to go back to work, despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, he has been supported by a wide array of rightwing figures, business groups and conservative politicians.

Some of those conservatives have taken the president’s concerns over the dire health of the US economy a step further – suggesting that the inevitable deaths of many people to the virus might be an acceptable cost of doing business in the face of a shocking economic collapse that saw more than 3 million new people register for unemployment.

“My message: let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living, let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves,” Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor, said last week on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.

“Don’t sacrifice the country,” Patrick continued.

Patrick even suggested many older Americans would happily risk their lives for the sake of the economy.

“No one reached out to me and said: ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” Patrick also said. 

“And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in. That doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like that, I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me.”