Donald Trump says the significance of the Coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 170,000 Americans, is that “God is testing me”.

Trump made the statement during a series of stops on airport runways on Monday, hoping to draw attention from the first day of the Democratic National Convention.

He complained to a small group of people, at his second stop in Mankato, Minnesota. He falsely asserted, “We built the greatest economy in the history of the world”:

Now we have to do it again. You know what that is?…That’s God testing me….

I said, “God, I’m the only one who could do this.”

He said, “You shouldn’t say that. Now you’re going to have to do it again.”

Even before the pandemic, the economy’s 3% growth rate and job creation was slower under Trump than in the final years of the Obama Administration.

Between April and June, US GDP fell 9.5%, an annual rate of 32.9%, the biggest decline since American economic records began.

More than 30 million Americans have lost jobs since February. Even though there has been a limited recovery this summer, there are still 12 million fewer jobs in the economy, and millions more people have dropped out of the workforce.

See TrumpWatch, Day 1,288: US GDP Collapses 9.5% in 3 Months

As Trump spoke, the US death toll reached 170,548, with 496 fatalities in 24 hours. Confirmed cases are 5,443,162, an increase of 40,101.

Oil Drilling in a Nature Reserve and a Wall to Render Human Flesh

Trump said nothing of substance about the pandemic in his appearances in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Instead, he called New Zealand’s daily toll of nine cases a “big surge”, declared falsely that Democrats want to get rid of the 2nd Amendment on the right to bear arms, assailed Presidential nominee Joe Biden as “the puppet of leftwing extremists”, and insulted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

See EA on Times Radio and talkRADIO: Kamala Harris’s Good Week v. Donald Trump’s Bad Week

Meanwhile, the University of North Carolina abruptly cancelled in-class instruction after 130 confirmed cases among students.

More than a dozen states plan to sue Trump over his efforts to sabotage the Post Service and November’s election.

The Trump Administration issued its order to allow oil drilling in the protected Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

And former senior Homeland Security official Miles Taylor revealed that Trump wanted to put spikes on a Wall with Mexico to render human flesh.

One day in February 2019, when congressional leaders were waiting for an answer from the White House on a pending deal to avoid a second government shutdown, the president demanded a DHS phone briefing to discuss the color of the wall. He was particularly interested in the merits of using spray paint and how the steel structure should be coated. Episodes like this occurred almost weekly.

Top DHS officials were regularly diverted from dealing with genuine security threats by the chore of responding to these inappropriate and often absurd executive requests, at all hours of the day and night.

One morning it might be a demand to shut off Congressionally appropriated funds to a foreign ally that had angered him, and that evening it might be a request to sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human flesh (“How much would that cost us?”).