Why
Is Trump So Enthusiastic About Americans Dying?
Two
weeks after America diagnosed its first case of COVID-19, Republicans in the
United States Senate (with the single exception of Mitt Romney) refuse to vote to
impeach Donald Trump.
They
decided he couldn’t do much more damage than he already has, and, as Senator
Susan Collins suggested, he would back down from his most outrageous behavior
because his hands had been slapped by the House of Representatives.
Now,
newly empowered and feeling invincible, he seems hellbent on a crusade to kill
hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Nobody
knows why Trump is so enthusiastic about encouraging people to get sick and die
from COVID-19, although there are a couple possibly viable theories.
Trump’s
and Republicans’ rhetoric all shifted a day or two after April 7, the day that
the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and other national media reported
that Black and Hispanic people were dying of COVID at about twice the rate of
white people.
Is it possible Trump and the racists in his Party think this is a good way to reduce the Black and Hispanics population, or at least that it’s not an issue for white people?
Is it possible Trump and the racists in his Party think this is a good way to reduce the Black and Hispanics population, or at least that it’s not an issue for white people?
Another
possibility has to do with Freedomworks, the group that was largely raised to
prominence by rightwing billionaires and helped fund the so-called Tea Party
movement.
Billionaires want their people back at work, be they in refineries or meat processing plants or retail stores, and they know that if some of those workers get sick and die there’s a never-ending supply of poor, unemployed people willing to replace them.
Billionaires want their people back at work, be they in refineries or meat processing plants or retail stores, and they know that if some of those workers get sick and die there’s a never-ending supply of poor, unemployed people willing to replace them.
A third possibility is that Trump simply loves the idea of people dying. This is the most bizarre of all these possibilities, but it appears to be a characteristic shared by strongman governments around the world, from Duterte in the Philippines who encourages police to murder drug users to Bolsonaro in Brazil who is enthusiastically taking actions that are killing indigenous people in the Amazon.
As
we hit what CNN is calling “apocalyptic levels“ of coronavirus
infections, it would be really useful to know why Donald Trump is so
enthusiastic about so many Americans dying.
Why
did he refuse to allow America to use the World Health Organization coronavirus
test kit back in January, February, March—and to this day?
Why
did he spend two months denying the obvious fact that this virus was coming to
the United States and was deadly, leaving us utterly unprepared?
Why
does he refuse to set a good example for Americans by wearing a face mask? Is
he more concerned about smearing his makeup than the death of 200,000
Americans?
Why
did he order his goons to intercept shipments of personal protective equipment and
ventilators going to blue states? Where is all that equipment that he hijacked,
and does he plan to offer it exclusively to red state governors? Is all this
death just about politics?
Why
is he shutting down testing sites in multiple states next week after bragging
in his Tulsa rally that he told his people to “slow down“ the testing?
Is
it possible he’s trying to let things get so bad that a vaccine in the fall
will be seen as an effective October Surprise? Is that why the vaccine
companies have gotten billions of federal dollars in what Trump calls
“Operation Warp Speed” while rural hospitals across the country continue to
close?
Since
the work of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister just after the American Civil War,
the world has known how to deal with infectious diseases. Why has Trump worked
so hard to convince his followers to ignore almost 200 years of medical
science?
And
what is it about right-wing leaders embracing death by pandemic? If Trump was
the only leader in the world doing this, it might make it easier to figure out.
But wealthy oligarchs who have taken over countries around the world are doing
the same thing.
Why
do these leaders want their people to die? Why does Trump want more Americans
to die?
Americans—and
the world—deserve answers.
Thom Hartmann is
a talk-show
host and the author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the
Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print.