Donald Trump is rushing headlong into sheer lunacy
As I write this, 340,003 human beings have died from coronavirus worldwide. Of that number, 97,647 of those deaths are Americans. In other words, America has 28% of all coronavirus deaths even though it comprises only 4.25% of the world population. Put another way, America has about 84,000 more deaths than it should. That extra number of deaths are child rapist and mass murderer Donald Trump’s fault. A competent president would have never permitted it. A president who cared about his people would have never permitted it.
Donald Trump is both incompetent and entirely without remorse for the tens of thousands of men, women and children he has murdered. Trump is a sociopathic murderer and he will never admit guilt. What he will do instead is cause more deaths, more heartache, more grief and more destruction. He will do this in the headlong pursuit of his second term. The tools he will use to create these deaths are hatred and division. Paradoxically, hatred and division distract many of his people from the deaths he has caused.
For his next act, Trump is trying to fill churches this weekend. He noticed he is slipping in the polls with his evangelical base, so he claims he has the power to override state governors and order churches to reopen. That the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution says otherwise is of no concern to Trump, even though he has sworn to preserve, protect and defend it. Trump understands, in a low, primitive, instinctive way, that his evangelical base will applaud his authoritarian pronouncement of power. They are particularly impressed with male authority spoken in angry tones, and for that reason many of them will approve of this headlong recklessness with their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Many churches will therefore reopen in defiance of their states because Trump wants them to.
Trump himself will probably attend no church service on Sunday, or any other day, as usual. Trump is an atheist. Many of his evangelical base won’t notice or won’t even ask why he isn’t in church too. Theirs is not to reason why, etc..
The number of American deaths due to coronavirus will surpass 100,000 by early next week. Before autumn drops its first leaves on the ground that number will climb to well over a million. Right now coronavirus is currently the greatest cause of death in the United States, more than cancer, more than heart disease, more than gun violence. Before the year is out it will be the greatest cause of American deaths in history. You may thank Donald Trump for that.
Trump knows that his order to reopen churches will further inflame even the non church-going segment of his base. They will sink further into the paranoid delusion that coronavirus is somehow a liberal plot to discredit Trump, and suppression of religious freedom is another extension of that plot.
Evangelicals will not make the connection that their own holy book says, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” They will not notice that Trump is the agent of division and desolation and he will ride their corpses and the corpses of their loved ones into a second term — if he can get away with it. He’s certainly going to try, and he doesn’t care how many Americans he must murder to succeed.
It is now officially too late in America. The destruction and desolation and division that has been loosed upon the land is unstoppable. There is no getting the genie back in the bottle. Trump has seeded America with human Petri dishes seething with coronavirus for distribution on an industrial scale.
Trump could have stopped it. He could have made a reasoned plea for uniform resistance against this common enemy. He could have united America. Liberals would have gone along with it because we would have known it was the right thing to do. Conservatives would have gone along with it because Trump would have told them to. America could have been a beacon of sanity. Instead it is an object lesson in suicide and a laughing stock of folly that has poisoned itself and much of the world by its preposterous leadership.
As an individual you can resist and survive. Wear a mask in public places. Make social distancing your vigilant duty. Never touch your face while in public places and refrain from doing so until you can get home and wash your hands. Sanitize everything you bring into your home, including mail and groceries. Think of COVID-19 as wet paint that you must breathe as little as possible and you must never get on your face. You have a good chance to be among the 20% who never get sick if you decide to, and if you make that decision now. In other words, 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.