Foolishness and failure at the top

Staff Writer
Richard Hermann

President Trump resumed his daily Covid-19 briefings in mid-July with an about-face on mask-wearing and the gravity of the pandemic. However, a few days later he was back to his abnormal comfort zone. He retweeted a video of a physician, Dr. Stella Immanuel, who proclaimed that masks don’t impede the virus. She also said that Hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that clinical trials show has no effect on treating the virus, but has some potentially serious side effects, has cured hundreds of her patients. This is the same doctor who attributes medical conditions such as endometriosis, fibroids, and cysts to demons that have sex with women while they sleep, and who claims that “alien DNA” is being used in human medicines. Not only did Trump retweet this nonsense to his 87 million Twitter followers; he also endorsed the doctor as a respected authority before hastily seeking shelter when reporters’ questions put him on the defensive.

Can you imagine if any other president spouted such claptrap? The country and the Congress would be in an uproar, desperate to find a means to rein him or her in and get them far away from the levers of power. But not Trump. After 42 months of stupidity, loutish behavior and utter madness, this is just another in a series of daily inanities and dangerous drivel that spews forth from this president’s forked tongue.

The other theme of his resumed daily briefings is his constant refrain of self-pity and whining. “How come Dr. Fauci is more popular than I am?” “How come nobody likes me?” “Wah, wah, wah.” It’s always about him, the eternal victim instead of who he really is, the victimizer whose criminal negligence has meant the death of 160,000 Americans and the impoverishment of millions more.

When the coronavirus loomed, all he had to do was act rationally, as many of his peers around the world did. The viral curve could have flattened and a staged reopening of the economy could have been possible. But even that simple, obvious path was beyond his capabilities. Instead, he spouted lies (“the virus is a Democrat hoax;” “It will disappear.”), buried his head in the sand, and encouraged red state governors to act recklessly in prematurely reopening their economies, foolhardiness that their citizens are now paying for with their lives.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines criminally negligent homicide as [occurring] when the perpetrator acts in a reckless, dangerous, or negligent manner which causes the death of another person. By this definition, Donald Trump, once he leaves office, could be indicted for more than 160,000 counts (and counting) of criminally negligent homicide.

I supported President Ford’s pardon of disgraced Richard Nixon for his Watergate-related crimes, believing that the country did not need to endure more of the Nixon nightmare. Now, however, I believe that Donald Trump needs to be brought to justice for the nation to be able to move on from the travesty and tragedy of his aberrational and monstrously destructive presidency. He may be able to pardon himself from paying for his federal crimes. However, in every state where a person has died due to Trump’s criminally negligent homicide, no self-pardon is possible.

In closing, I need to apologize for a statistical error I made several weeks ago. I wrote that Donald Trump was responsible for 98.5 percent of the Covid-19 deaths that have resulted from his inaction and lies, and his stupid, cruel and incompetent response to the pandemic. I was wrong. Last week more than 1,000 healthcare professionals wrote an open letter to our national leaders — “Shut It Down, Start Over, Do It Right” in which they said that “We could have prevented 99 percent of America’s Covid-19 deaths. But we didn’t.”
