The Trump murder spree
The “lock her up” crowd is back. This time calling for the imprisonment of Dr. Fauci. They bragged that they weren’t wearing masks. They believed they were more patriotic for not social distancing.
Maskless supporters packed a Phoenix theater for a chance to see Donald Trump where COVID-19 cases in the area have more than doubled thanks to the contagious Delta variant. University of Arizona emergency room Dr. Murtaza Akhtar called it “Extremely dangerous. And maybe it’s not politically correct to say it’s [also] stupid. Dangerous and stupid.” Many of the people shouted “no mask” to news cameras panning the crowd going in. It’s perhaps becoming the new battle cry — of the extremely stupid.
“You’re not just affecting yourself, you’re affecting everybody around you,” Akhtar said. Some of the attendees were elderly and many were overweight. And it’s a near statistical fact, with the new virulent Delta variant at large, that many who attended the Arizona Trump rally will be dead in six months.
What’s difficult to say is, how many people will they take with them? That is part of the infuriating problem in the calculus of casual COVID murder. No one can definitively pin the death of another human being on any one irresponsible fool who goes maskless and is proud of their ignorance. COVID is simply too small and its effects too random to be definitively traced. In some cases science can make educated guesses, but are those guesses good enough to overcome the burden of a reasonable doubt in a court of law?
What I’m really talking about is murder by COVID and the fact that fools for Trump are now and probably always will get away with it. It is a despicable extension of the murder spree Donald Trump went on as president. He is intent in baking in the new false equivalency, that anti-mask, anti-vaccine and anti-social distancing perversely equates to patriotism.
Welcome to the world of the murder by COVID. It’s the perfect crime perpetrated by the world’s stupidest criminals. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.