This Day in Failure: March 17

2020: “This is a pandemic. I felt it [coronavirus 2019] was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. All you had to do was to look at other countries.”
—U.S. President Donald Trump makes this statement after repeatedly characterizing the COVID-19 outbreak as a hoax.

2020: Neo-Nazi/Holocaust denier Arthur Jones—a former leader of the American Nazi Party—gets ten percent of the vote in an Illinois Republican congressional primary.

2009: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer—at 146 years old, the city’s oldest newspaper—publishes its last print edition, commemorating the day with a 20-page special section. “We see no opportunity for us to publish the P-I on a profitable basis,” said Hearst Corp. executives in a letter to P-I employees earlier in the year.

2001: Amtrak’s California Zephyr train—en route from Chicago to Emeryville, California—derails near Corning, Iowa, and skids down a 25-foot embankment adjacent to the track, killing one person and injuring 90 others.

1989: The eleventh-century Civic Tower in Pavia, Italy, suddenly and unexpectedly collapses, killing four pedestrians.