“Trump has all his life posed a moral puzzle: What is due in the way of kindness and sympathy to people who have no kindness and sympathy for anyone else? Should we repay horrifying cruelty in equal measure? Then we reduce ourselves to their level. But if we return indecency with the decency due any other person in need, don’t we encourage appalling behavior? Don’t we prove to them that they belong to some unique bracket of humanity, entitled to kick others when they are writhing on the floor, and then to claim mercy when their own crimes and cruelties cast them upon the floor themselves?
Americans are dead who might have been alive if Trump had met the challenge of COVID-19 with care and responsibility—or if somebody else, literally almost anybody else, had been president instead. Millions are out of work, in danger of losing their homes, living in fear. Tens of millions of young people have suffered disruption to their education, which will follow them through life. The pandemic was not Trump’s fault, but at every turn, he made things worse than they had to be—because at every turn, he cared only for himself, never for the country. And now he will care only for himself again…”
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis examined the Trump Administration’s failed public health response to the coronavirus crisis, which has led to the deaths of more than 207,000 Americans. The analysis demonstrates that over the last eight months, the Administration engaged in a persistent pattern of political interference—repeatedly overruling and sidelining top scientists and undermining Americans’ health to advance the President’s partisan agenda.
The Administration’s interference has occurred both in public view and in private, led by President Trump, Vice President Pence, White House officials, and political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other agencies. The apparent goal of this unprecedented, coordinated attack on our nation’s public health agencies during the pandemic was, in the President’s words, to “play it down.”
210,000 dead Americans are unavaiable for comments.
Now, as we enter the final month of the election, this period of convulsion careens toward its climax. Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation. Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated….
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