“Two weeks after
America diagnosed its first case of COVID-19, Republicans in the United States
Senate (with the single exception of Mitt Romney) refuse to vote to impeach
Donald Trump. They decided he couldn’t do much more damage than he already has,
and, as Senator Susan Collins suggested, he would back down from his most
outrageous behavior because his hands had been slapped by the House of
Representatives.
“Now, newly
empowered and feeling invincible, he seems hellbent on a crusade to kill
hundreds of thousands of Americans. Nobody knows why Trump is so enthusiastic
about encouraging people to get sick and die from COVID-19, although there are
a couple possibly viable theories.
“Trump’s and
Republicans’ rhetoric all shifted a day or two after April 7, the day that the
New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and other national media reported that
Black and Hispanic people were dying of COVID at about twice the rate of white
people.
“Is it
possible Trump and the racists in his Party think this is a good way to reduce
the Black and Hispanic population, or at least that it’s not an issue for
white people?
“Another
possibility has to do with Freedomworks, the group that was largely raised to
prominence by rightwing billionaires and helped fund the so-called Tea Party
movement. Billionaires want their people back at work, be they in refineries or
meat processing plants or retail stores, and they know that if some of those
workers get sick and die there’s a never-ending supply of poor, unemployed
people willing to replace them.
“A third
possibility is that Trump simply loves the idea of people dying. This is the
most bizarre of all these possibilities, but it appears to be a characteristic
shared by strongman governments around the world, from Duterte in the
Philippines who encourages police to murder drug users to Bolsonaro in Brazil
who is enthusiastically taking actions that are killing indigenous people in
the Amazon. As we hit what CNN is calling ‘apocalyptic levels’
of coronavirus infections, it would be really useful to know why Donald Trump
is so enthusiastic about so many Americans dying.
“Why did he
refuse to allow America to use the World Health Organization coronavirus test
kit back in January, February, March—and to this day? Why did he spend two
months denying the obvious fact that this virus was coming to the United States
and was deadly, leaving us utterly unprepared? Why does he refuse to set a good
example for Americans by wearing a face mask? Is he more concerned about
smearing his makeup than the death of 200,000 Americans?
“Why did he order
his goons to intercept shipments of personal protective equipment and
ventilators going to blue states? Where is all that equipment that he hijacked,
and does he plan to offer it exclusively to red state governors? Is all this
death just about politics? Why is he shutting down testing sites in multiple
states next week after bragging in his Tulsa rally that he told his people to ‘slow
down’ the testing?
“Is it possible
he’s trying to let things get so bad that a vaccine in the fall will be seen as
an effective October Surprise? Is that why the vaccine companies have gotten
billions of federal dollars in what Trump calls ‘Operation Warp Speed’ while
rural hospitals across the country continue to close?
“Since the work
of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister just after the American Civil War, the world
has known how to deal with infectious diseases.
“Why has Trump
worked so hard to convince his followers to ignore almost 200 years of medical
science? And what is it about right-wing leaders embracing death by pandemic?
“If Trump was the
only leader in the world doing this, it might make it easier to figure out. But
wealthy oligarchs who have taken over countries around the world are doing the
same thing.
“Why do these
leaders want their people to die? Why does Trump want more Americans to die?
“Americans—and
the world—deserve answers” (Why Is Trump So Enthusiastic about Americans Dying? by Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams).
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