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In a new Twitter video, Mr. Incompetent is now telling the family members of the more than 100,000 Americans who have already died unnecessarily of COVID-19—and the tens of thousands he still intends to slaughter at the altar of Wall Street—that “we'll never forget those incredible people but they will not have died in vain.”
Apparently, in Trump’s mind, “helping me win re-election” is synonymous with “not dying in vain.”
Trump’s tone-deaf new video dropped the night before his “Coronapalooza” rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where tens of thousands of poorly educateds will be forced to sign a waiver promising not to sue Trump if they catch the deadly and highly contagious coronavirus while crammed into an indoor arena with thousands of other people desperate to stroke Trump’s very weak and very fragile ego.
Suing people is something Trump thinks about a lot. In 2017, he suggested people should sue a journalist whose report caused a temporary 350-point drop in the stock market. In 2020, the millions who have lost money, jobs, or loved ones after being told that the “Carona Hoax Germ Flu” was nothing to worry about have, of course, a long list of people they could sue, starting with Individual Number One himself and his partner-in-lies, aka “Client Number Three,” Sean Hannity.
Trump’s total lack of empathy has long caused many to declare him a “sociopath” (as “Art of the Deal” ghostwriter Tony Schwartz began doing in 2016) and not “fit for office” (as John Bolton tells ABC News’s Martha Raddatz in an interview set to air Sunday night). In The New York Times bestseller “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” 37 mental health professionals led by psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee wrote about the existential threat deranged Donald posed to America and the world. And recently the whole world has seen that Trump’s physical and mental impairments are clearly getting worse.
But is it fair to call him a “psycho”?
In March, pre-lockdown, in an article entitled “American Idiot,”I began compiling a running list of the dumbest things Trump has said about the coronavirus. Back then, it was clear that Trump’s stupidity and his inability to process new information, combined with his own narcissism and his ongoing “fake news” schtick, was destined to make America’s experience with the coronavirus much, much worse than it needed to be. A little more than three months later, it is now also clear that Trump’s lies and political maneuvers—combined with his delayed implementation of social distancing recommendations and his ongoing disdain for mask wearing—have created a US death toll that’s 10 times higher than it needed to be. 121,000 are already dead (equal to 367 deaths per million population). The number could double in just a few more months. For comparison, as of today, fewer than three hundred people have died in South Korea (5 per million population), and fewer than 10,000 in Germany (107 per million population).
The New York Times has been writing obituaries for some of “Those We’ve Lost” in an ongoing series, some of whom I’ve featured in a Twitter thread:
As the pandemic continues, it’s easy to become immune to the ongoing human cost. (Meanwhile, Republicans somehow made “Benghazi” trend on Twitter again today, while continuing to shrug at a death toll equivalent to hundreds of new Benghazis every day.) As Stalin supposedly said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
It may be that politicians and the media are now in the “statistics” phase of COVID-19—more focused on new cases, hospitalizations, and rolling averages than the tragic loss of each individual life—but when Dear Leader tells all those whose loved ones died because he failed to protect them that their deaths during “this interesting period of time” were not in vain, he sounds more like a cult leader or a terrorist mastermind than a President.
He’s not simply being an American Idiot.
He’s being an American Psycho.
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