Donald Trump’s other deadly scandal
Last June, Palmer Report told you about TrumpDeathClock.com, which presents an estimated update of Donald Trump’s genocide for failing to take swift action to defuse the ticking coronavirus bomb before it exploded. At the time of my writing, that figure was 69,171. As I check now, the body count conservatively attributable to Trump has reached an unfathomable 284,017 and climbing.
Now, as Trump stands trial in the Senate after averaging one impeachment per two years in office, a leading British medical journal has published a damning scholarly swipe at Trump’s failed presidency. “Public policy and health in the Trump era” is a nearly 50-page study that exposes Trump’s many “singularly damaging” actions.
Lancet begins its takedown by stating what should be obvious to all: “President Trump’s time in office brought misfortune to the USA and the planet.” The study then points out that in 2020 alone, Trump exacerbated the spread of COVID-19, abandoned the WHO “when the world needed it most,” and reacted to peaceful anti-racism protests by “inflaming hatred and unleashing military force and vigilante violence that he subsequently mobilised for insurrection.”
Lancet found that if you simply hold Trump’s pandemic response to the standard of other G-7 nations, 40 percent of the 400,000-plus American deaths as of mid-January were avoidable. In addition, Trump’s anti-science agenda, declining spending on public health, and promotion of greater wealth inequality led to even more avoidable coronavirus-related deaths, with a disproportionate effect on minorities.
Backed up by hundreds of footnotes, the study also lambasts Trump for a wide range of other deadly failures, such as dismantling environmental regulations, abusing immigrant detainees, weakening food assistance programs and undermining health insurance coverage. In so many areas, Trump’s wrecking ball of an administration with the “best people” foisted countless inhumane and indifferent policies on a suffering nation.
Lancet also emphasizes that the disastrous outcome of the Trump years was not merely the unfortunate result of compassionate policies. For example, Lancet labeled Trump’s response to the devastation Puerto Rico suffered in 2017 from Hurricane Maria as “inept and insufficient” while highlighting that it was a reflection of Trump’s “disregard for the facts, people of colour, and the island’s predicament.”
Similarly, Lancet found that Trump’s actions caused 2.3 million Americans to lose health insurance over his term, and Trump’s environmental deregulation killed an estimated 22,000 people in 2019 alone from pollution. Speaking of pollution, the political swamp, which had become an overflowing fetid morass of narcissism, sadism, pettiness, and incompetence, is finally getting drained, thanks to an historic election.
In a news conference at the National institutes of Health yesterday, President Biden announced that his administration has now secured enough COVID-19 vaccines to inoculate nearly all Americans by the end of the summer. Regarding the mess he inherited from Trump, Biden could not have said it better: “[M]y predecessor—I’ll be very blunt about it—did not do his job.” Fortunately, we can go about our lives with full confidence that Biden is doing his.
Ron Leshnower is a lawyer and the author of several books, including President Trump’s Month