A Trump-Created Tragedy
In Year One of Covid, Trump's recklessness and incompetence put America on the path to 1,000,000 dead.
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Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, America has a higher death-rate-per-capita than any other wealthy nation.
As the total number of deaths in the USA approaches one million, Americans have died from Covid at a rate that’s 25% higher than people in the UK, 98% higher than in Germany, 3X higher than in Canada, 14X higher than in Australia, 15X higher than in Japan, and 16X higher than in densely-populated South Korea.
If America had simply handled Covid-19 as well as the bumbling buffoon Boris Johnson, more than 200,000 Americans who died from Covid would still be alive today. If we had done as well as Germany, nearly 500,000 lives would have been saved.
Trump’s White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx admitted as much back in March 2021.
And while other countries have done even better in containing the virus—in New Zealand, the total death toll is just 65, making New Zealanders 227X less likely to have died of Covid than Americans—it’s now obvious that having a leader of average competence in the first year of the pandemic could have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.
What Went Wrong in Year One? Everything.
Two years ago, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a “pandemic.” Five days later, then-President Donald Trump announced his “Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread” campaign which, despite it being more than twice the length of a regular “Infrastructure Week,” seemingly held his attention for only half as long.
Trump, as readers of this newsletter knew at the time, was not only the worst possible President to lead America through a pandemic, but by March 2020, he had already completely botched the nation’s Covid-19 response.
While the full extent of Trump’s psychopathic recklessness would not be revealed until months later, one of my first Substack posts in January 2020 detailed how Trump’s “disastrous public health leadership” and anti-vaxxer tendencies had already caused thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of excess American deaths during his first flu season as President.
On 26 February 2020, my article “It’s the Incompetence, Stupid” detailed how Trump’s deranged mismanagement had left “America woefully unprepared for the coronavirus crisis.”
As we quickly found out, February 2020 was the month in which Covid-19 “seeded” in NY, leading to a devastating first wave that Donald “Stable Genius” Trump and Jared “Boy Wonder” Kushner would have gladly transformed into a “Blue State Genocide” if they could have. Later, when analyzing what Trump actually did to stop Covid in February 2020, the answer was: nothing. He spent the month golfing, holding MAGA rallies, visiting his own resorts, attending GOP fundraisers, and taking an election-year ego-stroking trip to India.
On 29 February 2020, my article “Not a Hoax, Folks” explained why we were already at the point where trusting the President could cost you your life.
On 7 March 2020, in “Worst President Scenario,” I explained why Trump's multiple faults were transforming the coronavirus into a perfect storm.
On 8 March 2020, I began compiling a list of the most idiotic things Trump had said about the virus. The list quickly got turned into a popular meme. And things only got more idiotic from there:
On 10 March 2020, I wrote that “Trump’s Unforgivable Crime” was lying America into a pandemic, stating that “Trump has been lying to America about the coronavirus from Day One. And he’s still doing it.”
Trump’s failure to take Covid seriously, his failure to test, his failure to invoke the Defense Production Act, and his frequent promotion of “fairy tale” cures guaranteed that the pandemic would hit America harder than any other wealthy nation.
By June 2020, when Trump told his fellow Americans their loved ones wouldn’t have died in vain as long as he got re-elected, I asked “is it fair to call him a psycho?” By August, the diagnosis was beyond doubt.
In January 2021, I detailed how Trump had failed in his “most solemn duty” to protect American lives.
But Trump Didn’t Work Alone
While Trump was the root cause of America’s failure to protect human life during the worst global pandemic in 100 years, he didn’t work alone. Throughout his time in office, he had power-hungry (and DOJ-fearing) political/criminal accomplices inside the White House and Congress. And, even in 2020, many GOP Governors who were willing to mimic his recklessness, foiling the Trump-Kushner dream of confining Covid to Blue States and Democratic-led cities, and bringing Covid “Death Panels” to states like Texas and Utah.
Among the many Covid-related crimes of the last Administration is the fact that former Chief-of Staff and serial voter fraudster Mark Meadows withheld from the public and the Biden campaign Trump’s positive Covid test before the first debate. Trump’s positive result came on the same day that Trump hosted a Super-Spreader event for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
Former NJ Governor and Bridgegate conspirator Chris Christie said later it was “undeniable” that he caught Covid from Trump. Christie barely survived his illness. He also said it was “inexcusable” that Meadows saved the details of Trump’s positive test for his money-grabbing book.
It is also undeniable that those closest to Trump were accomplices in the mass-death he caused.
But he also had the full support of “State TV.”
Instead of Helping Flatten the Curve, Fox News Fanned the Flames
Even though, right from the start, Rupert Murdoch went to great lengths to protect himself and his family from the real pandemic, Fox News viewers were fed a diet of alternative facts. The Daily Show soon dubbed it a “Pandumbic:”
As I wrote in March 2020:
Fox News viewers have long been trained to treat science, expertise and facts with contempt. And COVID-19 is no exception.
Thanks to the dangerous lies being pushed by Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham and other Fox News hosts—many of which were parroted by Viewer-in-Chief Donald Trump—the number of Republicans who are taking COVID-19 seriously has plummeted from 72% to 40% in just one month.
In June 2020, with 128,000 Americans already dead, I highlighted research that showed that Fox News viewers in general—and Hannity viewers in particular—had a delusional belief in Trump’s extraordinary intelligence, combined with extremely low levels of concern about protecting the health and safety of “others” beyond their own family.
Trump’s relentless incompetence and psychopathic recklessness—aided and abetted by Fox News—turned Year One of the Covid-19 pandemic into an unmitigated disaster for America.
After Trump’s 2020 election defeat, any thought of stopping the spread was out the window.
Between Election Day 2020 and Inauguration Day 2021, Covid cases in the US multipled 2.5X, from under 10 million to more than 25 million. Meanwhile, the Covid death toll soared by 79%, from 243,530 to a previously unimaginable 435,809.
In other words, as president, Trump caused more deaths from Covid than America’s combat fatalities in World War Two.
He also made sure that Biden was inheriting a situation in which the virus was spreading out of control in a Covid-weary population where tens of millions of volatile anti-masking, Big-Lie-believing Americans had been thoroughly dumbed-down by misinformation and were furious that their “Stable Genius” was no longer around to hoodwink them.
Year One of Covid Was Bad. But 2021 Brought New Hope.
On a more positive note: Even if Trump had failed—by 90%—to deliver on his promise to adminster 20 million vaccines by the end of 2020, the good news was the vaccines were here.
More importantly, we had a new President and a new Adminstration that possessed both the competence and the compassion that Trump and his gang of criminal thugs lacked.
Things, it seemed, could only get better.
Unbelievably, however, instead of working to contain the virus and limit the loss of life, in 2021 the allegedly “pro-life” GOP doubled down on spreading death and disease, transforming itself into maniacal “death cult,” determined to sabotage Biden at every opportunity, no matter the cost to American lives.
It was Trump who set America on the path to one million Covid dead.
But it took an orchestrated campaign of lies and sabotage by “Freedumb”-loving GOP Governors and the Fox News Misinformation Network to get us there.
To be continued…
PART TWO: “An Incalculable Loss” Times Ten
PART THREE: “MAGA Massacre”
Unprecedented is an ad-free newsletter dedicated to exposing the dangerous lies, stupidity and corruption of today’s GOP. It’s FREE to read and subscribe, although if you’d like to select a paid subscription, I certainly welcome the support.
We've forgotten what "normal" used to be. We've been weakened, poisoned by the daily onslaught of insanity. It sometimes feels impossible to fight it. Those NY Times headlines prove it. Thanks for this article. I need to be reminded of how abnormal this all is.
Great article, and very accurate.