Any American national leader attuned to the global drama would have seen the coronavirus barreling down toward us like an unstoppable comet. Only the blind and blasé could have missed it – blind because of self-absorption – blasé because of blindness. This aptly describes President Donald Trump.
America is in an escalating medical emergency because of this blindness that ignored the blazing comet and is only now begrudgingly concerned after its alarming landfall. The intelligence branch of our government reported to Trump that a coronavirus pandemic was probably on our way back in January. But the president ignored this vital information. To the American public he dismissed the danger. As he suggested: It was just a small thing that would soon miraculously go away and, more likely, a hoax perpetuated by the Democratic Party.
Thus, nothing was done to prepare for the virus’s arrival. There was no radical engagement to increase testing capacity, to insure adequate safety equipment for health care professionals, to multiply desperately needed ventilators, to expand hospital facilities, to etc., etc., etc. Just a ho hum attitude designed to calm the economic market because its health was of far greater concern than the nation’s physical well-being – understanding that a good economy is essential to his re-election. The irony is that his lack of concern for the nation’s physical health has contributed consequentially to its economic health plunging into a critical state.
Now, as the crisis proliferates, the president positions himself as apart from it all and claims a prescient foreknowledge of the pandemic coming to America and a fast paced preparation for its approach that will cause America to fare better than all the other nations grappling with the virus. But this is just another fat lie, among thousands, to appease an all-consuming ego. And his echo-voice minions demonstrate their own integrity deprivations by affirming his self-aggrandizing posture.
He uses his emergency powers to see that corporations will be compensated for their financial losses and remain solvent while refusing to use these same powers to address the growing health care needs of the nation that invoked the crisis. Throughout the push for appropriating trillions of dollars of emergency funds to address the crisis he has favored the health of big business over the health of the citizenry. He has insisted that dealing with the virus as a health issue is the responsibility of state governments and not him-self. This is the same as the highest ranking military general saying that his subordinates, not himself, are responsible for the outcome of the battle. It is an abdication of presidential responsibility in the midst of national crisis.
Trump has indicated that we must re-open the businesses of the country with immediacy because the cure cannot be worse than the cause – that is, the impact on the economy is more vital than the citizenry death rate. This is why he has refused to shut down the country long enough to stop the spread of the virus. This is why he was counting on Easter as the moment our dying economy will rise in hallelujah triumph over its beckoning tomb. Such behavior by the nation’s highest officer reflects the calloused and calculating attitude of economic imperialism that values profit over people.
As a result of this perverse leadership, the physical health of thousands of citizens is in peril and many will needlessly die – particularly those vulnerable because of age, those with physical incapacities, and those on the front line of health care. And a mounting chorus of voices will rise from their combined graves: “Murderer, murderer, murderer!”
In the aftermath of the coronavirus rampage, Trump will not be held accountable by the nation’s courts for the murder of countless citizens. But those with a democratic conscience will. And history will make the indictment with boldness. But this will not matter to the needless dead.
Robert
Addendum: As this blog goes to press, the president has officially launched the USS Comfort, a naval hospital ship, to New York City to care for non-coronavirus emergency patients in relief of the city’s over-burdened hospitals. Undoubtedly, this will be helpful and welcomed. However, the president used the launch to make a re-election campaign speech that extolled his unmatched virtues as the greatest president in American history (forget George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt).
More important than the launch of the USS Comfort, he promised immediate delivery of millions of every kind of needed emergency relief supplies to all the nation’s states. But, he has made the same unfulfilled promises before so we will have to wait and see if this is just more of his unmitigated lies.
But even if some of these supplies arrive, it will just be another example of pandemic relief made too late by a president reluctant to respond to a dire national emergency. This lateness will still contribute to the expansion of the pandemic and thousands of deaths that could have been prevented. He remains a murderer by choice made from the compulsions of ego-mania.
