September 10, 2020
After four years, we thought we had lost the capacity to be shocked. We thought we had become inured to the daily onslaught of policies motivated by cruelty and greed; the barrage of grade school insults by tweet; the daily briefings full of the dangerously ignorant musings of a profoundly stupid man. We thought we understood what it meant to say that, with Trump, there is no bottom. It turns out, we were wrong.
Yesterday, Bob Woodward released excerpts from his new Trump book, “Rage.” The recording of his taped interview with Trump was released in which Trump said this on February 7th: “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your serious flu,” (Source: “Trump intentionally misled Americans on coronavirus,” by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, The Washington Post, 9/9/20).
Despite knowing this, for months, Trump publicly downplayed the seriousness of the virus, telling Americans that it would “go away on its own” and that it was all going to be fine, (Source: “ ‘It will go away’: A timeline of Trump playing down the coronavirus threat,” by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, 9/1/20). Worse still, Trump politicized the response to the virus, undermining public health. Trump’s campaign defied socially distanced seating arrangements and mask requirements at his June Tulsa rally. A few weeks later, prominent Black Trump supporter and former presidential candidate, Herman Cain, who attended the rally, died from COVID-19.
It is shocking to imagine that the person occupying the office of the presidency would actively lie to the American people in a manner certain to lead to more Americans dying, until you think about which Americans were dying. Although the initial sentiment about the coronavirus was “we’re all in this together,” by April, the picture began to emerge that Black people were disproportionately contracting COVID-19, and dying from it, (Source: “Early Data Shows African-Americans Have Contracted And Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate,” by Akilah Johnson and Talia Buford, ProPublica.org, 4/3/20).
Two weeks later, Trump was urging an end to the lockdown orders, tweeting “Liberate Michigan,” in support of the legion of heavily armed white men who had descended on that state’s capitol, demanding that Governor Gretchen Whitmer open bars and bowling alleys, in the midst of a raging pandemic, (Source: “Trump tweets “liberate” Michigan and two other states with Democratic governors,” by Craig Mauger and Beth LeBlanc, The Detroit News, 4/17/20).
As the months wore on, it became clear that Black, Latinx and Indigenous people, who were over-represented among frontline workers and plagued by pre-existing conditions that were the result of healthcare disparities, were bearing the brunt of the burden of the pandemic, (Source: “The Fullest Look Yet At The Racial Inequity of the Coronavirus,” by Richard A. Oppel, Jr., Robert Gebeloff, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Will Wright and Mitch Smith, The New York Times, 7/5/20).
Divorcing Trump’s actions from these facts would require us to ignore everything we know about him. He is a virulent racist who began his career in real estate discriminating against Black people and began his presidential campaign viciously maligning Mexican immigrants. He excoriated Woodward for suggesting that they examine their white privilege, dismissively saying that Woodward “drank the kool-aid,” (Costa, Rucker, The Washington Post, 9/9/20).
If you think I’m being hyperbolic, consider the other major news that broke Wednesday— that the Director of National Intelligence ordered intelligence doctored to downplay not only Russian election interference, but the threat posed by violent white supremacists, (Source: “D.H.S. Downplayed Threats From Russia and White Supremacists,” by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Nicholas Fandos, The New York Times, 9/9/20). Consider the fact that Trump has refused to condemn the 17 year old vigilante who murdered two protestors in Kenosha.
Trump, and those who support him, are distressingly comfortable with Black Death, to put it mildly. Commentators from Eddie Glaude to Anand Giridharadas have said we’re in the midst of a cold Civil War. I’m afraid they’re mistaken. It isn’t a cold one.
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