People dying from COVID-19 are irrelevant to Trump. The world is in the throes of a global pandemic, and the US has become the epicenter of that pandemic with 134,000 deaths so far, as a direct result of Donald Trump’s ineptitude, callousness, and narcissism. It is confounding that the US should have 25% of the world COVID-19 deaths when it has only 4.25% of the world population.
And yet, here we are. It is because there is no cohesive federal response to the pandemic, and Trump is more concerned with appearances, ratings and spin than he is with people’s safety. To wit, Trump has spent more time playing golf than he has meeting with top expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The result is not only chaos, but needless death. States are fighting every other state for essential supplies. The administration’s strategy is to outbid the states for the essential supplies, hijack the goods and put them in stockpiles, and provide no guidance that would help curb the spread of disease.
Meanwhile, Trump gaslights Americans with half truths about improved job numbers in which a small portion of the many millions who have been out of work since the crisis began have been rehired. He pretends that the economy is and will be humming along and “normal” while states are imposing lockdowns to get a handle on the crisis.
The death toll in the US should not have been this high. Take a look at the state governors who have been doing this with success, such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo and NJ’s Phil Murphy. Humane leadership saves lives. These unnecessarily lost lives are on Trump.
When it comes to American soldiers who heroically put their lives on the line to protect America, Trump is equally ruthless. Reports have come out that Trump knew about intelligence indicating that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers – and did nothing.
Even during the last three weeks since the story has broken in the press, he has still done nothing to take Russia to task for escalating matters. Placing bounties on the heads of American troops is one step away from an outright declaration of war by Russia itself.
Further reporting has shown that in 2017, Trump ordered the CIA to disclose intelligence to Russia with nothing in return, while US intelligence learned that Russia was arming the Taliban. This is also during the awful Helsinki spectacle when Trump prostrated himself before Vladimir Putin and took Putin’s word over US intelligence agencies regarding Russian interference in US elections. The suspicious deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan by Taliban are on Donald Trump.
Trump does not even care about the lives of schoolchildren, and has demonstrated his willingness to use them as pawns in his political game. He has announced that schools must open in the fall, regardless of what the virus experts recommend, no matter what the impact will be on children, as well as on their teachers and families.
His equally heartless education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is currently looking for ways to defund schools that do not reopen, adding cruel economic pressure to already strapped schools and families. Trump doesn’t care about all that. All he cares about is political appearances.
Real lives, even of the most vulnerable and innocent among us, are not important to him. The lives that will be lost as a result of opening schools prematurely will be on Donald Trump.
Trump has normalized callous inhumanity. He has enabled a culture in which his supporters think it’s okay to point a gun at a mother and daughter in a mall, that it’s okay to ram cars into peaceful protesters, and that it’s okay to scream at black and brown-skinned Americans to “go home” and “get out of our country.”
He enables hate, he emboldens violence, and ultimately, he practices a depraved indifference to human life.
When the president doesn’t care about American lives, it’s time to get a new president.
The writer is the chair of Democrats Abroad-Israel (democratsabroad.org) and chair of Vote From Abroad-Israel, the voter registration platform registering all Americans overseas to vote (votefromabroad.org).