[ We have not fully reckoned with just how much death is directly
attributable to Donald J. Trump. There is a compelling argument to be
made that he has achieved the remarkable feat of having personally
caused hundreds of thousands of people to die.]
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DONALD TRUMP IS PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF
COVID DEATHS  
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Hamilton Nolan
August 17, 2021
In These Times
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_ We have not fully reckoned with just how much death is directly
attributable to Donald J. Trump. There is a compelling argument to be
made that he has achieved the remarkable feat of having personally
caused hundreds of thousands of people to die. _

Photo by Win Mcnamee/Getty Images // In These Times,

 

As

emergency rooms once again overflow with Covid patients and hospital
systems in several areas near their breaking point, I cannot help but
think about blame. There is plenty to go around, beginning with
elected officials at every level and going right up to god. But I do
not believe that we have all fully reckoned with just how much death
is directly attributable to Donald J. Trump himself. There is
a compelling argument to be made that he has achieved the remarkable
feat of having personally caused hundreds of thousands of people
to die. 

I am not speaking here in the broad, generic sense: ​“Donald Trump
was president when the pandemic struck, and the federal government’s
response was flawed, therefore all of the deaths are his fault.” Nor
am I speaking in the most basic partisan political sense:
​“Donald Trump was the leader of the Republican Party, which has
institutionally rejected public health guidance, and therefore he is
responsible for these deaths.” What I am saying is that the
reptilian little mind of Donald J. Trump is the single most important
thing that led to more than 600,000 Americans dying of Covid so far,
and that it is also probably fair to say that his actions caused
countless more deaths worldwide. 

There is no doubt that many national, state and local political
leaders failed in the early days of the pandemic. Some combination of
laziness, ignorance and political cowardice caused politicians from
New York to Alabama to fail to properly and quickly follow scientific
guidance in a way that would have minimized the spread of the
coronavirus early on. Furthermore, the federal government utterly
failed to coordinate a competent national policy response, making the
useless patchwork of varying state rules a foregone conclusion, and
dooming us all to the prolonged nightmare that we are
still suffering. 

The Republican Party, which controlled the White House and the Senate
when the pandemic struck, bears most of the responsibility for this.
But it is important to understand that there is no inherent,
institutional reason that the Republican Party should be against
wearing masks, promoting vaccines and following CDC guidance. There is
no inherent, institutional reason that the Republican Party should
have been trying to cover up how bad the pandemic would be, feuding
with health officials who spoke truthfully, and strutting around
acting like the pandemic was a globalist conspiracy that could be
overcome by being macho. The Republican Party exists to protect the
interests of the rich. The Republican Party exists to cut taxes and
regulations on business. It is evil, manipulative and uncaring, but it
is not, institutionally speaking, _stupid_. Our federal government’s
reaction to the coronavirus was stupid. That was the result of a man
named Donald Trump. 

Consider another world in which a different, generic Republican had
been president in 2020 — Mitt Romney, or Mitch McConnell, or
some other replacement-level politician who generally embodied the
Republican Party’s beliefs. It is easy to believe that that person
would have fought against providing Covid relief to the poor, and
rushed to protect real estate interests at the expense of renters, and
maybe even advocated exempting churches from the shutdown rules to
score political points. All of those things are characteristic of
Republicans. What I do not believe is that the average Republican
president would have decided, ​“I am going to sow doubt about
wearing masks during a pandemic that is spread by airborne
droplets.” I do not believe that the average Republican president
would have decided, ​“I am going to loudly and publicly cast doubt
on the guidance of my own scientific personnel and advocate for
a host of quack remedies just because I like being the center of
attention.” Those are things that only Donald Trump would do. 

And he did, and now 40% of our fellow citizens won’t wear masks and
we can’t convince huge swaths of the country to get vaccinated and
therefore some states are seeing their worst Covid numbers since the
pandemic began, despite the widespread availability of effective
vaccines. This insane and unnecessary state of affairs is traceable to
the fact that Donald Trump, the man, is a fucking stupid person.
After many years with Trump as the leader of the Republicans, we tend
to assume that his own characteristics are those of the party. But it
would have been wholly unremarkable in the very recent past for
a Republican president to do all the typical bad things that
Republicans do, but also to follow the guidance of the CDC during
a public health emergency. The difference between anti-vax lunatics
and staunch anti-maskers being a tiny percentage of Americans and
being the enormous portion of Americans that they are today is Donald
Trump. He set this tone from the very top. He doubted from the
beginning. He downplayed all of this from day one. His cowardly party
followed him, and just like that, wearing masks were a political
issue, rather than a common-sense one. It did not have to happen. 

I am not excusing the rest of the political class, by any means. In
some ways, they are even more loathsome than Trump
himself — many of them followed his lead for purely political
reasons, even though they understood well that he is a dangerous
moron. But the fact remains that had Trump himself not been such
a bizarre, foolish, conspiratorial narcissist, we could have easily
had a nation that saw the coronavirus and our response to it as
a health issue, not a political one. Because Donald Trump needed to
be the big boss birthday boy and smarter than everyone else and always
successful and never wrong, he denied and obfuscated and argued and
eventually caused tens of millions of his acolytes to believe that
wearing a mask is tantamount to the end of American freedom. That is
on him. 

Many people would have died in this pandemic no matter what. Even the
most responsible countries had a learning curve, during which the
disease spread. The position we find ourselves in today, in August of
2021, half a year after vaccines became available to the public, as
local school board meetings descend into screaming matches over mask
mandates and intensive care units in Louisiana and Mississippi
overflow, is not the natural result of the virus. It is the result of
political actions. And those deadly political actions can all be
traced back to the determination of Donald Trump to do the stupid
things that he did, causing his pathetic minions in the Republican
Party to mimic him, and convincing millions of Americans who didn’t
know better that the danger they face does not exist. 

It is fair to guess that, compared to even a semi-competent but not
deranged _Republican_ president, America has suffered hundreds of
thousands more fatalities during this pandemic than necessary. We
could have quite easily had a president who was racist, who protected
the rich at the interest of the poor, who was just as bad as Nixon or
George W. Bush, but who was not irrational enough to think that there
is a reason to doubt that a mask can help stop the spread of
infectious droplets expelled from human mouths. We could, today, be
wrapping up the vaccinations of just about everyone. Instead we are
still mired in a disaster. Donald Trump’s hands are small, but they
hold an entire war’s worth of dead bodies. 

_[Hamilton Nolan [[link removed]] is
a labor reporter for In These Times. He has spent the past decade
writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian,
and elsewhere. You can reach him at Hamilton@​InTheseTimes.​com.]_

_Reprinted with permission from In These Times
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All rights reserved. _

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