Make sure to understand that the disastrous leadership failure on COVID has actually consisted of a series of equally disastrous terrible decisions from Trump and the GOP:
- to ignore disease warnings,
- to suppress testing,
- to resist lockdown,
- to fail to provide critical resources,
- to promote dangerous alternative therapies that wouldn’t work,
- to resist the use of masks and social distancing,
- to prematurely open up the economy,
- to fail to provide adequate financial support for workers who could not and should not work
- to provide financial support for the rich and for companies that did not need it,
- to run corrupt processes that rewarded administration cronies and failed to help fight the disease,
- to politicize the disease response to help red states and to actively seek to harm blue states,
- to misrepresent the seriousness & scope of the crisis month after month after month,
- to ignore the lessons of countries around the world that fought the disease successfully and the lessons from those that did not,
- to withdraw from the international community and international institutions,
- to spend wastefully,
- to attack political leaders who did not embrace their strategy and penalize the constituencies represented by those leaders,
- to shut down whistleblowers and truth tellers within the administration,
- to not just ignore science but to condemn it, to vilify it,
- to fail to treat the spread of the disease with urgency,
- to seek and promote distractions from the disease to hide their failures,
- to fail to recognize that the only way to avoid economic catastrophe was to effectively deal with the disease,
- to fail to address the disproportionate negative impact the disease was having on communities of color and on the poor,
- to shutdown the processes and ignore the policy recommendations past administrations had set up to prevent the disease
- and then, this week, to fail to provide for the 25 million people whose support from the government has now run out although they had plenty of advance warning of this deadline and are well aware of its devastating consequences.
There are undoubtedly other items that I have forgotten to add to this list. But the message should be clear. This was not a case of negligence. This was not a case of stupidity. This was not a case of incompetence. This was a case of a president and the entire GOP leadership consciously, day-in and day-out, weighing the facts and then ignoring them, hearing from scientists & then ignoring them, reading about the moral or the economically sound or the medically sound response and then ignoring them. Every single day they made conscious decisions that led to death, to suffering, to economic deprivation, to the weakening of the US, to the detriment of the world, to the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, to the worst public health catastrophe in 100 years.
Over 155,000 people are officially dead in the US. The real number, based on scientific data analysis is probably already greater than 200,000. Before the year is out that number will almost certainly pass 300,000. We are approaching 5 million cases of the disease.
We have the highest unemployment rate in our history. Some economists believe it will take the world until 2026 to recover to 2019 levels. The growth collapse of the second quarter alone wiped away 5 years of economic growth. But worse than the stunning statistics are the individual realities: the suffering of patients suffocating, struggling to breath, separated from their families, alone, dying, terrified, the sacrifices of doctors and others on the front lines putting themselves at risk and often suffering the same fate.
It is hard to imagine the big numbers involved here. It is harder to still to imagine the human costs. But it is especially hard to swallow both when they are the result of repeated, calculated decisions whose consequences were known before they were undertaken.
In any other such circumstance, we would be speaking of what was done as a crime against humanity, as mass murder. In this instance, we are so politicized, so afraid to speak the name of what has happened, that few dare to do so. But when leaders choose to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives and to inflict suffering on millions for political reasons, by choosing to do what they see as in their political and personal self-interest ahead of the well-being of an entire society, then that is a crime.
It is not just a crime, it is a great crime. It is in fact, perhaps the greatest crime every perpetrated on the American people. These leaders have committed great crimes in the past. They have run roughshod over the Constitution.
They have enriched themselves and their supporters at the expense of the taxpayers. The president is a credibly accused serial sex abuser. He has violated campaign finance laws. It is likely he has violated tax laws. He is a traitor.
He and Barr and McConnell and their associates have betrayed the country and their oaths of office in countless ways. But this is, thus far, perhaps their most egregious crime. We are unaccustomed to seeing public health or economic crises in such terms.
But look at the facts. Look at the choices they made. Look at their consequences. And you will see no other verdict can be done. It will be the measure of who we are as a society whether we dare frame this as it is, speak the truth about what has happened and is happening and hold them accountable. We must also take steps to ensure that such abuse, callousness, maliciousness, recklessness, criminality can never ever be undertaken again by our leaders at the expense of our people and of the entire planet on which we live.
