Having closely followed the political events in 2016, I was startled when after a long hard fight, Donald Trump emerged as the winner over Hillary Clinton. Almost everyone had assumed—with solid evidence and positive polls—that Hillary would prevail. How wrong we all were! While she won the popular tally by almost three million votes, our peculiar electoral system saw Donald Trump eking out a victory.
What happened? Progressive forces had neglected to give sufficient attention to the plight of millions of white working-class males in the industrial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. Neither had they been aware just how negative Hillary came off. To this day I remain mystified as to her unpopularity. But unpopular she was, and while Trump was hardly a spotless hero, the election boiled down to the lesser of two evils.
So we have been stuck with Trump for these four years. Day after day we have been increasingly disturbed by his policies: building a wall on our Southern border; turning his back on the “dreamers”; his racism; his unhealthy conniving with Putin while he turned America away from our long-time democratic allies; his rejection of the hard-fought treaty with Iran; his myriad attempts to scuttle “Obamacare”; pulling us out of the “Paris Accords” while rejecting the overwhelming scientific evidence concerning the disastrous effects of climate change; his amazing declaration after the Nazi’s Charlottsvile rally, that there were “very fine people on both sides.” On and on it went. But it was all in fair pursuit of a winning political agenda.
And then came the pandemic during which Trump regularly asserted he knew better than the scientific and medical communities about how to deal with this potentially devastating monster. When it became clear that paying attention to the virus was seriously inhibiting the economy, he urged America to “open-up.” This demand included governments, businesses, beaches, bars, restaurants and even schools, all of which, when reopened, resulted in a devastating rise in new cases added to he number of America’s dead. He blamed this appalling situation on fake news, the Democratic Party. China, not on anything he had done.
In the meantime, our lack of adequate testing made controlling the virus impossible. While other nations managed to contain it, we did not. Trump repeated the patent absurdity that the number of cases was the result of increased testing, therefore curtailing testing would reduce the threat. No tests means no cases! Really? So Americans continued to die-- the result of his tragic policies. In the meantimeTrump and his fans refused to wear masks or observe social distancing, practices his Administration endorsed.
Something very different, however, came to light on September 9 when Bob Woodward in his book , Rage, Trump had proudly announced that he knew early in February just how deadly the virus was, but hid this information so as not to cause a panic--meaning the news might have had a negative effect on the economy. These were not Woodward’s comments or those of some unidentified informer, but Trump’s own recorded words.
At the same time, he was calling the virus a harmless hoax that would soon disappear. During those critical weeks when the spread of the virus could have been blunted he did nothing to prepare the nation for what was on the horizon. As a result, thousands died, and the tragic total approached 200,000.
Up to now we might have simply regarded that Trump’s words only flowed from a misguided political judgement. After all, politics is a tough, often brutal game. But when the President knew how dangerous the virus was, and lied to the American people, I believe we must now reluctantly use the word “EVIL!!”
When a group of Saudi terrorists hijacked commercial jet liners crashing them into the Twin Towers and killing almost three thousand Americans, we rightly called those terrorists “evil” and so they were. So what should we call a President whose lies have resulted in multiple thousands of deaths? Trump’s duplicity and the results are not just matters of political expediency, but a violation of basic morality. The thousands of dead Americans now rise from their graves pointing their quaking fingers at Donald Trump and crying EVIL!!!
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