The-Ave.US

“The Trump administration engaged in ‘deliberate efforts’ to undermine the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic for political purposes, a congressional report released [on] Friday,” December 17, 2021, says (read story here).

While the report was put out by a House subcommittee controlled by Democrats, this isn’t just partisan talking points. It’s hard facts, supported by evidence.

Those facts show Trump’s White House “repeatedly overruled public health and testing guidance by the nation’s top infectious disease experts and silenced officials in order to promote then-President Donald Trump’s political agenda.” He hosted a meeting “with people who promoted a herd immunity strategy” criticized by Dr. Deborah Birx as “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.”

She wasn’t the only one. “A few months later in October, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins called for ‘a quick and devastating published take down’ of the herd immunity strategy, according to emails obtained and released by the subcommittee.”

Birx told the subcommittee when she arrived to the White House in March 2020 to coordinate the federal government’s response to Covid-19 “more than a month after the U.S. declared a public health emergency, she learned that federal officials had not yet contacted some of the largest U.S. companies that could supply Covid testing.”

There’s more: “Birx also told the panel that [Dr. Scott] Atlas and other Trump officials ‘purposely weakened CDC’s coronavirus testing guidance in August 2020 to obscure how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country.’”

The Trump White House also “blocked requests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” for more than three months “to conduct public briefings” about how serious the unfolding crisis was.

It didn’t stop there. “Trump political appointees [also] tried to pressure the Food and Drug Administration to authorize ineffective Covid treatments the president was pushing, like hydroxychloroquine …, over the objections of career scientists.” The Trump administration also refused to purchase N95 masks needed by health care workers if they were made abroad at a time when “profiteers were peddling defective and fraudulent PPE at inflated prices.”

It goes on and on. (Read the linked article for more details.)

Trump deserved to be fired for this. You may say he deserved to be fired for his election lies and attempts to overthrow the election results, but remember, that happened after the election. He was a lousy president in other ways, too, but Covid-19 was the big crisis of his presidency and he not only bungled it, he sabotaged many of the things that could have been done. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died on his watch, and some of those lives probably could have been saved if grownups had been in charge, instead of a self-centered infant and his sycophants.

And there’s little doubt this is why voters fired Trump. He’d probably still be president if Covid-19 hadn’t upended the 2020 election, which he entered with a booming economy, and barely escaped with his life when Covid-19 came back to bite him and nearly killed him.

Of course, I’m not saying it should have. No one should wish for such a thing. But 81 million Americans were within their rights to want a better president than him; and the election lies, scheming, violence, gun brandishing, threats against election officials, and civil war and coup talk were and are profoundly disrespectful of their rights as citizens to elect someone else.

When I talk to people about what Trump, his supporters, and Republicans in Congress did after the election — and some continue to do even today — I use the word “respect.” In a lacking sense. They disrespected the Constitution, and our rights under it; they disrepected us. That is larger than any policy or action of his administration.

But, as I said, that came after the election, and didn’t determine the election’s outcome. Trump’s gaming of the Covid-19 crisis — “mishandling” is too kind a word — is why he deserved to lose, and is what the voters fired him for.

He more than deserved it, because that wasn’t just poor leadership or mismanagement; he abused the powers entrusted to him to advance his own self-interest. The President of the United States is a public servant and an employee. We put him there to serve us, not himself. That’s something Trump still doesn’t understand.

But he certainly should be able to understand this:

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