April 7, 2020: The Day Everything Changed With Trump's Response To The Coronavirus
Trump's sociopathic response -- which was undertaken knowing *exactly* what would happen -- caused the deaths of an additional 500,000 Americans. He will face no consequences for those crimes.
“When you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
President Donald Trump, February 26, 2020 (one of at least 38 times he lied and said the coronavirus was currently disappearing or would soon disappear)
Narrator: The number of cases on March 1, 2020 was not “close to zero”.
On April 7, 2020, the front pages of both the Washington Post and the New York Times featured articles about a stark disparity in deaths from COVID-19. News of that disparity was highlighted on news broadcasts by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and numerous other print and cable media.
The Times’ top headline that morning — Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States — was followed the next day by this one: Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb. On April 7, the Times reported:
The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates…
In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is.
Thom Hartmann, The Hartmann Report, July 13, 2023:
It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race or Covid: it was purely systemic racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth, and are also over-represented in low-paid public-facing service jobs where they would more easily catch Covid.
It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course Black people are going to die more frequently from coronavirus.
Once Donald Trump and his Fascist Cult realized this fact, their tepid response to the emergence of the coronavirus got even slower and aimless. If the virus is killing mostly black and brown people, then fuck it. Why stand in its way? In fact, we’ll help it do its job!
Hartmann:
April 7, 2020 was the day everything changed in America. And hardly anybody realizes it.
It was the day that caused Jared Kushner to decide that letting Black and Hispanic Americans in Blue states die of Covid — yes, intentionally using the force of law and social pressure to push people into death’s jaws — could become part of what he called “an effective political strategy” to help them win the 2020 election, and Donald Trump signed off on it.
There are no links in that snip, but Vanity Fair published an extensive report. If you google “vanity fair” and Kushner’s four-word quote, you get plenty of information.
Hartmann quotes Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who stated that same day:
[W]e can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.
Brit Hume was a guest that night. He told Carlson: “The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.”
Carlson meant white people when he referred to “the rest” of the “grievously hurt” Americans. Hume meant white people when he noted the coronavirus turned out to be not as dangerous as “we” first believed. It’s not for nothing that Carlson’s show was dubbed The White-Power Hour. Carlson also told his audience that white supremacy was a “hoax” (hate groups grew 55% with Trump in office), promoted the evidence-free conspiracies of Nazis, and warned that the genocide of white people was the real danger (as opposed to attacks against non-whites, which sky-rocketed while Trump was president). Fun Fact: Counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw a 226% increase in hate crimes.
Hartmann:
Only 12,677 Americans were dead by that April day, but now that Trump and his rightwing media believed most of the non-elderly dying people were and would be Black and Hispanic, things were suddenly very, very different.
Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about getting those Black and Brown people back to work, even if it meant exposing them to a deadly disease!
On April 12th, Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up and would announce a specific plan to do that “shortly.”
On April 13th, the ultra-rightwing, nearly-entirely-white-managed US Chamber of Commerce published a policy paper titled Implementing A National Return to Work Plan.
The next day, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery” program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield” businesses from Covid-deaths and -injuries lawsuits.
Three days after that, Freedomworks and the House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that “[I]t’s time to re-open the economy.”
Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide” encouraging conservatives to show up “in person” at their state capitols and governor’s mansions, and, for signage, to “Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep [the signs looking] homemade.”
One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 19th in mostly-white New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with angry white people had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere. . . .
When Rachel Maddow reported on meat-packing plants that were epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding white community: the sick people were mostly Hispanic and Black. . . .
The Republican meme was now well-established and was being repeated virtually daily on Fox “News” and rightwing talk radio. Working-age white people were far, far less likely to get less sick, more likely to be asymptomatic, or — even if they were unlucky and got sick — most likely to survive a trip to the hospital.
Then came news that bigger outbreaks than we realized were now happening in meat packing plants, places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).
Trump’s response was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. . . . [T]he death toll among working age affluent white people (who could telecommute and/or were less likely to be obese, have hypertension, or struggle with diabetes) was relatively low.
It took a lot of pressure off Trump and his Republicans. They could now politicize the virus, and, if they did it right, they could do so publicly with a “wink” to their white supremacist base. And if they could get the economy back to cranking along within the next few months, they might be able to pull the 2020 election out of the bag.
As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:
“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”
It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And there was an election coming in just a few months.
At year’s end, the United States was ranked 5th worst in the world in our response (behind Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Iran); we had about 20% of the world’s Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of the world’s population.
The lasting legacy of Trump’s changes in policy and encouraging Covid skepticism is that today we’re the world’s worst in terms of death and sickness . . .
More people have died of Covid in America, as a percentage or in absolute terms, than any other developed country in the world.
Why? Because Trump and his Republican enablers and co-conspirators were just fine with getting the economy back on track to win an election over the bodies of dead Black and Hispanic people, particularly when they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors. . . .
Trump’s change — from a policy of prevention to a policy of “herd immunity” once he realized on April 7, 2020 that healthy white people were largely immune from death by the coronavirus — put the US on-course to have the worst Covid death rate in the world.
That was the day everything changed because Trump and Kushner were willing to let Black and Hispanic people die on a gamble they could still put the economy back together fast enough to win the 2020 election.
Over a million Americans have died so far, more than any other nation. Multiple studies show that up to 500,000 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if Trump had just promoted masks and lock-downs through the year before the vaccine was available and, since then, if he had condemned the anti-vax movement that emerged in the last months of his presidency.
But he didn’t do either. All because he knew the virus disproportionately killed Black and Brown people and he was willing to do anything to win the election.
And sure enough, as Congress reported last December, a massive number of those deaths were — as a clear result of Trump’s policy — among Black and Hispanic people.
If that’s not racial mass slaughter, aka genocide at a Serbian war crimes level, then the phrase has lost much of its meaning.
Barbara McQuade, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010-2017, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, and a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, wrote in July 2022 that Trump could credibly be charged with manslaughter in respect of the five deaths related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Under federal law, involuntary manslaughter occurs when a person commits an act on federal property without due care that it might produce death.
James Fallows of The Atlantic wrote in November 2020 that Trump’s indifference to the suffering (and eventual deaths) of hundreds of thousands of Americans from the coronavirus amounted to negligent homicide or manslaughter — in the nonlegal, commonsense meanings of the terms, at the very least:
Negligent homicide has a specific meaning in the law books. The standards of proof and categories of offense vary from state to state. But the essence is: Someone died because someone else did not exercise reasonable care. . . .
Did the person who caused the death actually mean to do harm? It’s a distinction that matters a lot to the defendant, but not to the victim. Whatever the legal outcome, a person who—except for another’s indifference to risks that should have been foreseen—would still be living and learning and loving, instead is dead.
That’s the law of negligent homicide. The ultimate legal reckoning for what we are now living (and dying) through will be a matter for legal authorities to take up, or decide to drop, when they have the evidence . . .
Many terms that have legal connotations can be useful in their plain everyday sense as well. Not everything we’d call an assault matches the state-by-state standards that define that crime. Not everything we call theft—or blackmail, or even rape—would count as such in an indictment or could be proved in court. Similarly, when removed from their courtroom and legal implications, terms like negligence and manslaughter and, yes, homicide are useful right now. They give us a way of assessing the horror a government is visiting upon its people.
In late 2020, Peter Kelman, an attorney in Massachusetts, posted an “interview” with the foreperson of a jury (“FP”) from an alleged trial of Trump (which found him guilty of negligent homicide). I don’t know why Kelman set his trial in Texas. This “Q&A” is dated July 25, 2023 — which, even now, is still in the future. Still, it’s worth reading to see how an actual case could have been presented and how a jury might conclude Trump was responsible for nearly 500,000 preventable deaths.
PK: What evidence was most compelling in reaching your decision?
FP: We looked at it like this. The judge gave us the statute. It said: “A person commits criminal homicide if he intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence causes the death of an individual.” The prosecution hammered home the point about criminal negligence. They kept saying that negligence is the failure of a person to act how a competent person would act in a similar situation. The judge read us the definition of negligence in Texas. He told us that under Texas law negligence is defined as, “the failure to do that which a person of ordinary prudence would have done under the same or similar circumstances, or doing that which a person of ordinary prudence would not have done under the same or similar circumstances.” It became quite apparent after presentation of all the evidence that Trump was far from prudent. They drove home the point that compared to prior presidents who faced similar emergencies, Trump’s actions were self-serving and, in our opinion, led to the deaths of thousands of Texans.
PK: How so, what made him seem so incompetent?
FP: I guess it was the way he handled the whole COVID-19 crisis. At the beginning denying its severity. I mean the way he kept downplaying it. But what really convinced us was the prosecution’s case that his whole approach to finding a cure was counterproductive. That was what sealed the deal. We believed that if he had taken a more rational approach a vaccine would have been developed many months sooner than it was. And that was why we convicted him. We convicted him because his failure to adopt a presidential, rational approach to finding a cure, in our opinion, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Texas.
PK: What was wrong with the approach he took?
FP: The evidence was overwhelming. He did nothing to speed up finding a cure when he could have easily taken presidential actions that would have accelerated the process. And then, when we heard the evidence about the investments of his friends in those businesses that got government funds, at that point not only did he fail to accelerate finding a cure, he actually impeded finding a cure. All for the financial benefit of his friends and ultimately to assist in his failed re-election campaign. . . .
No case of this type will be brought against Trump, but it certainly could — and, in my opinion, should — have been brought. the prosecution would have a mountain of evidence against Trump, much of it — as is the case with his two ( and soon-to-be four) indictments — coming from Trump’s own big mouth. (One small example that springs to mind: “Slow down the testing, please”.)
Stealing and then sharing or selling top secret/classified documents to the enemies of your country is bad.
Demanding officials in (at least) two states rig their state’s vote count and declare you (the loser) the winner is bad.
Planning (and, among other things, claiming six months before the election that it will be rigged against you if you lose) and inciting a seditious riot (including allowing your supporters to carry deadly weapons, including AR-15s, during the riot) in order to overthrow the government and install yourself as an unelected dictator — which was only one of six or seven different plans for you to overthrow the government — is bad.
But causing the needless deaths of roughly 500,000 Americans because of your sociopathic indifference to their suffering, creating delays and spreading already-debunked lies that led to unnecessary deaths (and killed children, especially) — indeed, spreading more disinformation than anyone else on the planet — being responsible for uncalculable amounts of despair and extreme, long-lasting illness and financial ruin and death for the sole, selfish reason of attempting to paint your political opponent in a bad light (which was the exact opposite of what to do, of course, so it failed completely; if Trump had done the bare minimum, he would have won re-election by an actual landslide and been able to insulate himself from multiple indictemnts and a veritable hailstorm of criminal charges, but he’s a fucking moron with a dementia-soaked uh-brain) is far, far worse.