An Unspeakable Horror: How Donald Trump Sentenced Hundreds of Thousands of Americans to Agonizing, Lonely Deaths
“Think of what would have happened if we didn’t do anything,” President Donald Trump said Tuesday night after delivering the news that his government projected 100,000 to 240,000 Americans to die from the coronavirus in the next few months. The failure of a president patted himself on the back, saying that had he chosen to just “ride it out” like business people had advised him we could be looking at 2.2 million dead.
It has become a macabre ritual watching these press briefings. For weeks now, every afternoon has brought new horrors as Trump arrives in the press room or the Rose Garden and delivers one discordant address after another. Some days he’ll tell the country it’s almost over, that a cure is imminent, that maybe he’ll reopen the country by Easter for a resurrection. The next he’ll have an awkward corporate CEO say a few oddly chosen and discomforting words.
These briefings have been like shoddily produced variety shows put on just as TV moved from wholesome, family fun paid for by General Electric to grittier, adult pastures. The Donny Trump Fun Hour. With appearances by the owner of My Pillow and a special cameo by regular Mike Pence. The kind of thing Trump and his army of sycophants have probably pitched to every television network a hundred times over.
“Just get him in front of the camera,” they’d say. “He’s a star. He’ll make something happen.”
Trump, however, has run out of ways to razzle dazzle his way through this mess. On Tuesday he stood in front of a graph that looked like a mountain rising from the plains. A mount of suffering and lonely death. A mountain he had built with his very own grubby little hands.
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There isn’t a mild way to put this.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party damned hundreds of thousands of Americans to a lonely, agonizing death.
Hundreds of thousands of living, breathing human beings are going to either die in their homes, far away from medical treatment, or else in overcrowded hospitals, kept from the comfort of their families, attended to by exhausted, terrified, undersupported, overworked medical staff.
And none of it was necessary.
No matter how Donald Trump spins it, no matter how Fox News now fills its hours with revised history that its always taken the coronavirus seriously, no matter how Rush Limbaugh has changed his tune and contracted faux amnesia of his earlier derision, this tragedy lies at their door.
Further, the Republican Party has played a murderous game for decades now, wagering short-term profit and continued power over a sustainable future. At every step, to protect their seats in Congress and leverage presidencies, they have destroyed any conversation of reform in any way, including in healthcare. As we watch a broken, antiquated system groan and break under the weight of a pandemic, we cannot forget who has protected and venerated that system: the Grand Old Party.
With Right Wing media, the strategy was similar. For decades Fox News has irresponsibly pushed dangerous narratives that have no relationship with truth or fact. The purpose has been to help the Republican Party maintain power while selling a racist dystopia to an audience predisposed to believe a racist dystopia. They have attacked facts in the most damning possible way: by simply laughing at them and dismissing them with the flick of a hand. They have created in the country, or nurtured anyway, a poisonous distrust of experts and science, that distrust undoubtedly dooming thousands of their own dedicated viewers, their own “heavy users” to terrible, terrible deaths.
And Donald Trump. What is there to say? A terminally insecure narcissist, Trump was always a disaster in the making. His election in 2016 was the weeping sore that announced a long, long festering disease. The worship of money at the expense of societal bonds. The total victory of nationless, duty-less corporations. The drowning of society in illusions and the total rejection of anything even approaching objective reality.
In a way, you almost can’t blame Trump for what has happened. Even in the best case scenario, Trump would fail. If there had never been a problem in Trump’s four years, he would have created crises all of his own. His nature dictates as much. He is chaos personified, an authoritarian who is incompetent but ceaseless sure of his own competence. A walking, talking disaster who will destroy every organization he’ll ever be a part of while driving people mad for his incessant bragging and boasting.
But watching him bristle at even the most sensitive of questions - let us not forget American media in this list, either, as they have abdicated any responsibility for reporting the news or holding our leaders accountable in favor of access-trading and the grubby, disgusting word of inside-the-Beltway-largesse - and deny even the smallest shred of regret or empathy, all while wasting the people’s time boasting about how good a job he’s done in “limiting” the death toll to a quarter million Americans is as infuriating a thing as any of us could have ever imagined.
The truth is that Trump cannot govern. He can only destroy. For months he ignored an obvious, growing pandemic. He was more concerned with reelection. With golf. With flavored vapes. He was too busy with the business of Donald Trump. The glowing, gilded variety hour that has been running for seventy-three years. He was more concerned with producing his own round-the-clock reality show, with him at the garish center, as always, than he was the lives and fates of you, me, and all the people we know and love.
The truth is almost too horrible to speak. But speak it we must.
Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. He is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, forthcoming from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.