Studying history is like always getting the after-action report without having to deal with the play-by-play. This has been a horrible year, the worst things happened and the worst person in the world is in charge, making sure that the worst things continue and are made worse by his actions or inaction. It is easy to forget in the day-to-day outrages and lies that trump is, through his callous and sociopathic response to the novel Coronavirus, the greatest mass murderer in American history.
In this age of 24/7 news services, social media, and the politicization of everything it is really important to have actual journalists willing to do the legwork of compiling, cross-referencing, and connecting the fire hose of news on a single subject. History officially begins 20 years ago, we still have no idea how trump's abuse of power will affect how badly the COVID-19 pandemic ultimately becomes. But there is enough evidence on record to assemble a narrative that strains out the noise of all the disasters in America to focus on just how badly trump behaved this year. There just isn't a strong enough word to describe how awful he is and how strongly attached his authoritarian followers are to this disaster.
Remember how he joked "what have you got to lose?" by voting for this singularly unqualified, incompetent, narcissistic, lazy, cruel, vindictive, preening, smug, lawless monster? The list of crimes is miles long, the list of lies tenfold longer, the abuse of power and profiting from the office he squats in dwarfs the original sin of how he got to this position; treason. The only thing more daunting is the depravity, denial, and obedience of republicans from top to bottom. Now we know, and hopefully the future will understand that fascism is always there just under the surface, smoldering, ready to ignite and consume our precious institutions that gave a veneer of civilization so exhaustingly won from the aristocracy over more than two centuries.
Historians, professional academics with credentials that are far better than mine, have not even started really beginning the chronicle of George W. Bush's crimes, lies, and abuses of power. Now the right-wing authoritarian followers, with a huge assist from Russia, were suckered in by an even bigger con-artist social dominator who hated the same people they did and promised pain for their enemies; openly and without much push back from those precious institutions we all have been taught would protect the republic from tyranny. The office of the presidency has vast power, and now all Americans have a much better understanding of how powerful and destructive those powers can be in the hands of a sociopath.
The Trump Pandemic: A blow-by-blow account of how the president killed thousands of Americans.
By WILLIAM SALETAN
At the time [July 17], nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus. The interviewer, Chris Wallace, showed Trump a video clip in which Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a difficult fall and winter ahead. Trump dismissed the warning. He scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along. “Everybody thought this summer it would go away,” said Trump. “They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? So they got that one wrong.”Trump’s account was completely backward. Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus. In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption. The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump. And he hadn’t gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers. He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February.The phone call, the talking points Trump picked up from it, and his subsequent attempts to cover up his alliance with Xi are part of a deep betrayal. The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. [emphasis mine]
As of writing, the number is now over 181,000 deaths and 5.88 million cases, many of whom will suffer permanent organ damage and suffer health consequences for the rest of their lives. What Saletan reveals by putting all of these fragments of data, the lies and abuses of power, in chronological order in a well-written narrative style history is how much worse the pandemic has been because of trump. This is really important because of how deluged Americans are with scandals and disasters on so many topics which has a tendency to dissipate focus on how singularly responsible the man who refuses to take any responsibility for exacerbating the pandemic is actually exacerbating the pandemic which has affected all of us. I kept thinking at the beginning of the pandemic that republicans can't lie to a virus, no amount of scapegoating, demonizing Democrats, or fox news noise can mitigate the spread of this disease. As always, I hate being right. I wrote about how unprepared and overstretched the private health care system was here.
Saletan neatly summarizes the fact that trump dismantled every defense and preparation for an epidemic that he inherited from the Obama administration and before then. And trump had two stories about it, he had to save money for tax cuts (obvious but unstated by Saletan), and he was too busy golfing and ripping off the treasury or just outright too stupid and lazy ("other priorities" as Saletan notes). But the timeline Saletan links to for the conspiracy with China and all the lies accompanying it must have fallen through the cracks because I don't remember much of that. But the dueling lies about Chinese trade deals and the Chinese virus are fascinating. Somebody forgot to inform Laura Ingraham which side of the duel was du jour because she asked trump about human rights abuses, that has been framed as a socialist (i.e. Democratic) plot rather than an authoritarian one but trump was doing the "cozying up to dictators" routine that day. I promise that will be funny one day but thinking historically I lol-ed today.
Before getting into Saletan's treatment of trump's refusal to take steps towards containing the spread of COVID-19, refusal to increase production of PPE and supplies like ventilators, or testing for the virus I wanted to share CNN's chief White House correspondent's tweet from this morning. Just to focus a little closer on how the compartmentalized thinking of authoritarian leaders makes Benjamin Franklin's adage about not believing anything you hear so timeless.
Trump on his approach to the virus: “We are focusing on the science, the facts and the data” Trump is saying this to a non-socially distanced crowd where supporters aren’t wearing masks.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 28, 2020
Gosh it would be great to have a political press willing to risk being impolite to fascists more often. But I guess once in a while has to do.
Not until March 11, six weeks after blocking travel from China, did Trump take similar action against Europe. In a televised address, he acknowledged that travelers from Europe had brought the disease to America. Two months later, based on genetic and epidemiological analyses, the CDC would confirm that Trump’s action had come too late, because people arriving from Europe—nearly 2 million of them in February, hundreds of whom were infected—had already accelerated the spread of the virus in the United States.
The second step was to gear up production of masks, ventilators, and other medical supplies. In early February, trade adviser Peter Navarro, biomedical research director Rick Bright, and other officials warned of impending shortages of these supplies. Azar would later claim that during this time, everyone in the administration was pleading for more equipment. But when Azar requested $4 billion to stock up, the White House refused. Trump dismissed the outcry for masks and ridiculed Democrats for “forcing money” on him to buy supplies. “They say, ‘Oh, he should do more,’ ” the president scoffed in an interview on Feb. 28. “There’s nothing more you can do.”
The third and most important step was to test the population to see whether the virus was spreading domestically. That was the policy of South Korea, the global leader in case detection. Like the United States, South Korea had identified its first case on Jan. 20. But from there, the two countries diverged. By Feb. 3 South Korea had expanded its testing program, and by Feb. 27 it was checking samples from more than 10,000 people a day. The U.S. program, hampered by malfunctions and bureaucratic conflict, was nowhere near that. By mid-February, it was testing only about 100 samples a day. As a result, few infections were being detected. [emphasis mine]
Trump did these things. The refusal to test until the pressure to increase it gets strong enough is a through-line of his awful, awful response. And that refusal stems from his bloated self-image, narcissism, and infantile rejection of object permanence... it "looks bad" because if we can't see it it's not happening; people aren't actually dying. That is his rationalization.
Trump didn’t just ignore warnings. He suppressed them. When Azar briefed him about the virus in January, Trump called him an “alarmist” and told him to stop panicking. When Navarro submitted a memo about the oncoming pandemic, Trump said he shouldn’t have put his words in writing. As the stock market rose in February, Trump discouraged aides from saying anything about the virus that might scare investors.
The president now casts himself as a victim of Chinese deception. In reality, he collaborated with Xi to deceive both the Chinese public and the American public. For weeks after he was briefed on the situation in China, including the fact that Beijing was downplaying the crisis, Trump continued to deny that the Chinese government was hiding anything. He implied that American experts had been welcomed in China and could vouch for Beijing’s information, which—as he would acknowledge months later—wasn’t true. On Twitter, Trump wrote tributes worthy of Chinese state propaganda. “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation,” he proclaimed.
Finally, masks.
The simplest way to control the virus was to wear face coverings. But instead of encouraging this precaution, Trump ridiculed masks. He said they could cause infections, and he applauded people who spurned them. Polls taken in late May, as the virus began to spread across the Sun Belt, indicated that Trump’s scorn was suppressing mask use. A Morning Consult survey found that the top predictor of non-use of masks, among dozens of factors tested, was support for Trump. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that people who seldom or never wore masks were 12 times more likely to support Trump than to support his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Some scientific models imply that Trump’s suppression of mask use may have contributed to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.
There are so many more instances where trump's actions or inactions, suppressing speech, holding mass rallies, delaying production or distribution of vital supplies, and so on that have led to increased deaths that it is simply too big a betrayal of his oath to comment on. I urge you to read the whole article and follow the plethora of links to internalize the scope of this crime. We historians criticize Herbert Hoover for his refusal to act, or act in ways that exacerbated the scope of the Great Depression as bad leadership. What do you call consistent actions to that lead directly to mass death and suffering? By election day it is possible (Dear God, let me be wrong on this one) that more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than in WWII. Putin got his money's worth when he accomplished this coup against American democracy. In his wildest dreams the Russian military, or any other for that matter, could not inflict so many casualties on American service members. But in the end, this is Trump. His legacy is death.
History is more of an art than a science, you can look for parallels and similarities in events but it is impossible to conduct scientific experiments. There is no way to know how many Americans would have died if Hillary Clinton had taken office from an election she won by almost 3 million votes. Elections have consequences, decisions made by leaders have real-world effects. Trump can have no benefit of the doubt, no rationalizations for his actions and words; he caused this. And may he rot in hell for it after being tried for the greatest mass murder of Americans in history and all of his other crimes.
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