What Donald Trump must answer for
As I write this, 158,365 Americans are dead from coronavirus. Since I know that most of those deaths would have been prevented had a decent man or woman who believed in science been elected president of the United States I’m going to place all of the blame for all of those deaths on Donald Trump. I’m fully aware that both Trump and his supporters would regard my blame as unjust because that is what cowards and snivelling, quibbling, little people do. They shrink from responsibility. But Trump gets the full weight not just of the actual responsibility but the theoretical responsibility as well. If Trump were a different man, a man of any courage or rectitude at all, he would accept that responsibility. Because he is a liar and a coward he does not.
Just to put that number in perspective, 158,365 deaths is more than 53 times as many innocent human beings who died as a result of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. It’s 2.7 times as many Americans who died in Vietnam. It’s more than a third as many Americans who died in World War II. The number includes men, women and children of all ages and conditions who had a perfect right to be alive today.
They are not alive today because of Donald Trump. Trump almost never mentions them, except to use their deaths as a bragging point about how much worse it would have been had he not placed a partial travel ban on China in January. I’m not kidding, he actually said that, and his open mouthed followers actually believe it. When in January of 2016 Trump proclaimed, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” it wasn’t, as it turns out, hyperbole.
Those American coronavirus deaths don’t stand alone, by the way. They represent perhaps a million people who are suffering the unnecessary agony of loss right this very minute, as I write this.
It’s instructive to note that the people who don’t care about these deaths are the same people who pretend to care about the destruction of protoplasm called a foetus that, if left to itself, would eventually form a human being. But that protoplasm fashions no personal relationships, has no wives or husbands or children, is not an organized person in any true sense of the word. The passing of that protoplasm causes no grief in the same sense. There were no memories formed, no histories, no friendships, no loves, no personal tragedies endured nor triumphs celebrated. Yet the defenders of that undifferentiated bit of protoplasm have brought us to the horror we face today in this Trump presidency. Their so-called pro-life movement formed the basis of Trump’s success, and the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people was the result of that monstrous success. Like their lord and master Trump, his glassy-eyed acolytes don’t care about those unnecessary deaths either.
No matter our success in November, no matter how much we are able to undo the damage this child raping, murdering monster Trump has done, the men, women and children who died unnecessarily of coronavirus won’t be coming back. Their deaths won’t be remedied by voting Donald Trump out of office. They are dead — forever. And there are more to come.
We won’t only have a victory to celebrate in November, we will also have a devastation to mourn. Much of the horror that Trump has visited on the American landscape is permanent, and it deserves to be permanently enshrined in our memories. Let’s not only proceed with a will for unity but with the sobering realization that we have many thousands of human beings to avenge. The best way we can honor them is to come together as a single voice in November and vote this monster out of office. 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.