Trump’s Deliberate COVID Lies Killed Tens of Thousands. His Election Lies Killed Only Five
Do Any Republicans Care Even A Little Bit About The Graveyards That Trump’s COVID Lies Have Filled?
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Unswerving Loyalty To Your Tribe Excuses All Sins
You would think that people would care more about deceit, blunders and incompetence that cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives than they do about loyalty to a person, an organization or a political religion, but they don’t.
We humans are such horrible, terrible, tribal animals that no matter how massive the loss of lives and no matter how great the cost, we often refuse to reject, leastwise punish, our tribe’s malevolent leader for his transgressions.
Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and COVID-19 prove this to be utterly true.
In January 2020 Trump Understood How Very Deadly COVID Was
Trump admitted on tape that he absolutely knew how damaging, contagious, dangerous and fatal COVID was way back in January 2020. But, because he believed that downplaying the threat would help him remain in power, he engaged in a massive, deliberate, deadly disinformation campaign about the huge threat posed by the virus.
Trump Encouraged People To Gather In Large Groups & Not Wear Masks
Throughout the entire last year of his Presidency right up until November 3, 2020, knowing it was a lie, Trump told the public that COVID was “fake news,” that it wasn’t a real threat, that it would go away in the warm weather, that it would die out all on its own, that once the election was over COVID would disappear from the news, that wearing masks and social distancing were not only unnecessary but, even worse, that practicing them was a signal that you had been suckered by the liberals’ fake news and were engaging in nonsensical left-wing political correctness.
Trump told them that not wearing a mask was an exercise of their God-given right to be free, that gathering in large groups and not wearing masks was patriotic, and like the good little tribe members they were, that’s what Trump’s supporters did, a practice that not only ended up overwhelming the nation’s health-care systems but also inflicting a financial disaster on America’s businesses.
The lives lost and serious illnesses suffered because of these knowing and deliberate lies were not in the tens of thousands. They were, I believe, over one hundred of thousand.
Had Trump worked as hard to encourage social distancing and wearing masks as he worked to discourage social distancing and discourage wearing masks, I believe that not only would over a hundred thousand Americans not have died, but the disease could have been so controlled that businesses in the USA, like those in China, would have been able to reopen and trillions, not billions, trillions of dollars would have been saved.
Trump Refused To Combat COVID On A National Basis
Beyond encouraging people to gather in groups and not to wear masks, the Trump Administration refused to treat the pandemic as a national emergency to be fought with national planning and coordination.
Trump’s government failed to centralize the purchase and distribution of PPE, medications, etc., leaving each state, county, city and hospital to compete with each other in a bidding war which massively drove up prices paid by local governments that were already short on money, and additionally, it completely Balkanized and disrupted the supply chain.
Imagine the chaos if each state had been told to purchase their own guns, bullets, tanks and bombers with which to fight WW II.
The refusal to centralize the fight against COVID was absolutely the worst choice that could possibly have been made, but Trump wasn’t thinking about the good of the country. He was thinking about minimizing the apparent danger from the virus.
The Refusal To Coordinate The Delivery Of The Vaccine
Keeping with his prior laissez faire policy, Trump’s roll-out of the vaccine was similarly catastrophic.
Again, the Trump Administration gave the vaccines to various hospitals or State agencies and said, “It’s up to you to figure out how to get the shots into arms.”
The states, of course, were totally untrained and unprepared to do that, and that institutional paralysis resulted in half to two-thirds of the vaccines sitting in warehouses, unused.
Any halfway competent Administration would have been working on a detailed end-to-end distribution plan months ahead of the vaccines’ approval.
Those plans would have been developed in advance and in concert with the states to guarantee extensive, comprehensive coordination between the Federal suppliers of the vaccines and the state and local agencies charged with administering the vaccines.
But that’s not what the Trump Administration did. Again, Trump followed the same, chaotic, “Here’s the vaccine. It’s up to you to figure out what to do with it” mess that marked Trump’s implementation of the other phases of the pandemic response.
Downplaying The Virus Was A Deliberate Strategy
Why was there no coordination or national plan? Because Trump was only concerned about his re-election, and his logic was that if he treated COVID as a horrible, dangerous, national threat instead of a relatively minor irritation like a particularly bad strain of the flu, it would disrupt the economy, cost jobs, hurt the stock market and therefore threaten his chances of winning a second term.
His mental arithmetic was that the less serious people thought COVID was, the higher his chances were of getting re-elected.
Following this plan, he pretended that COVID wasn’t a big deal, that it would go away in the warm weather, that the country would painlessly acquire “herd immunity” and thus his re-election could proceed unobstructed.
None Of Trump’s Supporters Cared About What He Had Done
The shocking thing about Trump’s deliberate, massive, pervasive, criminal, misinformation campaign about the seriousness of the virus and how to fight it combined with the Trump Administration’s complete incompetence in actually combating it, is that no one in the Republican Party and essentially none of the Trump voters cared.
Not at all.
Because of Trump’s lies and incompetence I believe that hundreds of thousands of Americans died and trillions of dollars were lost, and none of Trump’s supporters cared.
Nobody in the GOP said, “Trump has willfully killed hundreds of thousands of Americans by lying to us about the virus and by discouraging social distancing and wearing masks, even though he absolutely knew the virus was deadly and that social distancing and wearing masks would save hundreds of thousands of lives.
“He told those lies because he thought it would be politically beneficial to him. This is an outrage. This is a massive violation of his oath of office. He must be removed from office for this terrible act of, if not mass murder, at least mass manslaughter.”
It never entered their minds.
- The leaders of the Republican Party knew Trump was lying about the disease.
- They knew he was lying about masks and social distancing.
- They knew he had totally bungled the supply and distribution of PPE.
None of them stood up and said, “The President is lying to you and it’s killing you and bankrupting our country” any more than Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham or any of the rest of them stood up and said, “The President is lying to you. The election was fairly conducted. It wasn’t stolen. The President just plain lost.”
The truth was totally unimportant to them.
The Tribe’s Members Only Cared About Trump
The only thing the leaders of the Republican Party cared about was KEEPING Trump in charge of the nation’s response to this disease even though they knew it was going to cost the country even more lives and more money.
Killing Thousands With COVID Lies Was Worse Than Inciting An Insurrection With Election Lies
Sure, Trump incited an insurrection by lying egregiously about the election being stolen, but nowhere in any of the impeachment debates did anyone even mention the thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans who died as a direct result of Trump’s massive, serious, constant, continuous, deadly lies about masks and social distancing for his own personal gain that caused horrible, fatal consequences to hundreds of thousands of Americans and huge damage to the country itself and none of the elected Republicans or Trump supporters seemed to even notice, leastwise care.
Not even a mention.
Republican Cowards
I think about the Americans who had the courage and patriotism to go to war for this country and who never came home, who climbed into airplanes and flew into machine-gun fire, who sat in prison camps from Frankfurt to Hanoi as the price for protecting America, and then I consider the Republican members of Congress who are afraid to criticize leastwise punish Trump for his despicable, fatal misconduct because it might hurt their chances of getting re-elected, and I despair.
Please check out my column: The Bravest Man I’ve Ever Met. You can’t see courage any more than you can see character.
Is there any conduct by an elected Republican that is so bad, so deadly, so reprehensible that a significant number of the Republican True Believers will have the decency, leastwise the courage, to oppose it?
Apparently not.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
