Thousands of Americans died horrible deaths from COVID because of Trump
By Thom Hartmann for the
Families broken and shattered; husbands, wives, children and grandchildren left bereft; doctors, nurses, and physicians assistants dying along with them or holding their hands as they draw their final, tortured breath. Many of those deaths were absolutely unnecessary.
All across America this past year-and-a-half 700,000 people have died an agonizing, terrifying, drowning-in-their-own-fluids death, their relatives helpless, saying goodbye using Zoom or FaceTime.
They happened because of decisions made by a small group of
people led by Donald Trump.
If you or I made any decision, grounded in the desire to
gain a political or other type of benefit, that caused even one single person
to die we’d be on our way to prison. Look at people who simply decide to
text while driving…and then kill a pedestrian. Prison.
Trump not only caused over 130,000 Americans to die
unnecessarily (according to Dr. Deborah Birx’s
sworn testimony before Congress last
week), but there’s a pile of evidence — which I’ll lay out below — that he did
it because he believed the virus was hitting Blue states and Black people the
hardest.
If this is true (and I’m building a case here that it is),
it’s called second-degree murder, which, to use the definitions of the State of Florida where Trump lives (there is no federal homicide law)
constitutes:
“The unlawful killing of a human being, when
perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved
mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to
effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree
and constitutes a felony of the first degree, punishable by imprisonment for a
term of years not exceeding life…”
From the first case in the US on January 20, 2020 until the week of April 7th of last year, for four months Trump and his team were actually trying to do something about the Covid pandemic.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was
freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York
hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only
22, but that was enough to spur federal
action. Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 11th, and most of
the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome that week.Lucas Jackson/Reuters
The Dow collapsed and millions of Americans were laid off,
but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration. Jared Kushner
put together an all-volunteer
taskforce of mostly preppie
30-something white men to coordinate getting PPE to hospitals.
They even had a plan for the Post Office to
distribute 650 million masks — 5 to every
American household — to stop the pandemic.
But then came April 7th, when the New York Times ran a
front-page story with the headline: Black Americans
Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.
Other media ran similar headlines across the American media
landscape that day, and it was heavily reported on cable news and the network
news that night. Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, the report
found, were Black or Hispanic, not white people.
White conservatives responded with a collective, “What the
hell?!?”
Limbaugh declared that afternoon that “with the coronavirus, I have
been waiting for the racial component.” And here it was. “The coronavirus now
hits African Americans harder — harder than illegal aliens, harder than women.
It hits African Americans harder than anybody, disproportionate
representation.”
It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out
why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race: it was purely systemic
racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything,
from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth.
It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a
healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to
keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course they’re
going to die more frequently from coronavirus.Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
But the New York Times and the Washington Post
simultaneously publishing front-page articles about that disparity with regard
to COVID19, all on April 7th, echoed across the rightwing media landscape like
a Fourth of July fireworks display.
Tucker Carlson, the only prime-time Fox “News” host who’d
previously expressed serious concerns about the dangers of the virus, changed
his tune the same day, as documented by Media Matters for America.
Now, Tucker said, “we can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the
rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our
response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back
to work? That’s our task.”
White people were out of work, and Black people were most
of the casualties, outside of the extremely elderly. And those white people
need their jobs back if we’re going to get Trump’s economy back on track in
time for the upcoming election!
Brit Hume joined Tucker’s show and, using his gravitas as a “real news
guy,” intoned, “The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we
thought.”
Left unsaid was the issue of for whom it was “not quite as
dangerous,” but Limbaugh listeners and Fox viewers are anything but
unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white
supremacy.
Only 12,677 Americans were dead by that day, but now that
Trump and his rightwing media knew most of the non-elderly were Black, things
were suddenly very, very different. Now it was time to quit talking about
people dying and start talking about getting people back to work!
It took less than a week for Trump to get the memo,
presumably through Fox and Stephen Miller.
On April 12th, he retweeted a call to
fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared,
in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up,
and that he’d be announcing a specific plan to do just that “shortly.”
On April 13th, the ultra-rightwing, nearly-entirely-white-managed US Chamber of Commerce published a policy
paper titled Implementing A
National Return to Work Plan.
The next day, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and
-funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery”
program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield”
businesses from lawsuits.
Three days after that, Freedomworks and the House Freedom Caucus
issued a joint statement declaring that “[I]t’s time to re-open the economy.”
Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide”
encouraging conservatives to show up “in person” at their state capitols and
governor’s mansions, and, for signage, to “Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let
me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep [the signs looking] homemade.”
One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread
national attention was April 19th in New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with white
people had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.
One that drew particularly high levels of media attention, complete with
swastikas, confederate flags and assault rifles, was directed against the governor of Michigan,
rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer.
NBC News, when they’d gotten hold of April
emails from within the White House, ran the headline: “Trump Administration Scrapped Plan to Send Every
American a Mask in April, Email Shows.”
When Rachel Maddow reported on meat packing plants that
were epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the
Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out
that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding
white community; they were mostly Hispanic and Black.
The conservative meme was now well established.
Then came news that the biggest outbreaks were happening in
prisons along with the meat packing plants, places with few white people (and
the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).
Trump’s response to this was to issue an executive order
using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order
production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black
workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.
African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were
dying in meat packing plants, the elderly were dying in nursing homes.
But the death toll among working age white people,
particularly affluent white people (who were less likely to be obese, have
hypertension or struggle with diabetes), was relatively low.
And those who came through the infection were presumed to
be immune to subsequent bouts, so we could issue them “COVID Passports” and give them hiring priority.
As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s
team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE
response to the virus noted to Vanity Fair’s
Katherine Eban, “The political folks
believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that
they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political
strategy.”
It was, after all, it was exclusively Blue States that were
then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s
grandson Max Kennedy Jr, 26, was one of the volunteers, and blew the whistle to
Congress on Kushner and Trump. As Jane Mayer wrote
for The New Yorker, “Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political
appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as ‘a marketing genius,’
because, Kennedy said they’d told him, ‘he personally came up with the strategy
of blaming the states.’”
At year’s end, the United States was ranked 5th worst in the
world in our response (behind Brazil,
Mexico, Colombia and Iran); we have about 20% of
the world’s Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of
the world’s population.
Why? Apparently because Trump and his Republican enablers
and co-conspirators were just fine with Black people dying, particularly when
they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors.
And once they put that strategy into place in April, it
became politically impossible to back away from it, even as more and more Red
State white people became infected.
Everything since then, right down to Trump’s December
26th tweet (“The lockdowns in
Democrat run states are absolutely ruining the lives of so many people — Far
more than the damage that would be caused by the China Virus.”), has been a
double-down on death and destruction.
How could anybody think this was anything other than
negligent homicide at best and intentional murder at worst?
Even Sweden has put
together a commission to look into their
government’s response to the pandemic, and it’s already reporting its
result.
In Brazil, their Senate has compiled a 1000+ page report, detailing the mistakes and malicious actions President
Bolsinaro took — very much like Trump did — that caused hundreds of thousands
of unnecessary deaths, and they’re recommending he be prosecuted under Brazilian
and international law.
It’s astonishing that there’s no major, national commission
or special prosecutor looking into what happened here in the US, particularly
when so much of the evidence of the Trump administration committing murder is
publicly available.
If a half-million people had died — unnecessarily — under
Obama as president, you know how the GOP would react.
After all, they spent millions to hold 4+ years of multiple
hearings across several congressional
committees over 4 American deaths in Bengazi, taking thousands of hours of
testimony, including an 11-hour day from Hillary Clinton.
During the Clinton presidency Republicans gave Ken Starr
and his assistant Brett Kavanaugh four years and $70 million to uncover the
democracy-ending crime of Bill Clinton getting a BJ from a consenting adult.
(Seriously: Newt said it endangered “the survival of the American system of
justice.”)
In this case, there are actual dead bodies, and a hell of a
lot more than four of them.
Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer must appoint select
committees in the House and Senate to investigate this crime, and Attorney
General Merrick Garland must appoint a special prosecutor with a grand
jury.
Americans deserve to know why their friends and relatives
died such a terrible death when every other country in the world (except
Brazil) took strong and effective action to limit infections and
fatalities.
And if it can be proven that Trump and his buddies like
Scott Atlas let all these Americans die because they thought it would help them
politically, people need to go to prison.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.