TWGB: Legacy, 400,000

 

-84 days after the 1st recorded passing due to COVID-19, the US surpassed 100k deaths.
-121 days later, the US surpassed 200k deaths.
-84 days later, the US surpassed 300,000 deaths
-36 days later, the US topped 400k deaths.https://t.co/AqwjyKWQz3

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) January 19, 2021

In this tweet, Congresswoman Tlaib notes the rapid advance of the COVID-19 death toll, because the number is staggering, because these were our fellow Americans, because the damage done cannot go unnoted. Given the advantages the United States had, or should have had, so very little was made of our resources, because the people at the top (Trump above all) did not know how or couldn't be bothered or both.

If you need to know, my heart was in a place "more of sorrow than of anger" when Trump was elected, even understanding all I ever thought I wanted to know of this man's character. I was concerned about his racism and incomplete understanding of the American project in terms of our democratic values as a creedal nation, but I was stricken that so many others believed, or wanted to believe, in his version of greatness. 

His version of greatness lost the House and the Senate for his party, the trust of our allies, our esteem around the world, millions of jobs, he has widened inequality, he lost us the unique privilege of being a nation that enjoyed a peaceful transition of power according to our democratic elections. He added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. He never really built his stupid wall, even if he shut down the government a couple times.  He didn't end wars so much as shuffle around military personnel. He made the cultural domestic cold war at the minimum room temp. At worst, we will see more terror.

But he lost 400,000 human beings, in part because he thought the ones being lost were the right ones--blue state minorities. He knew the disease was bad and lied to us. I could go through the lot of the TWGB stacked case against Trump's presidency: his useful idiocy for Russia; his shameful act at Helsinki; his miserable cabinet choices; his lackluster policy; the way his snotty rich kid thin-skinned inability to fake competency for the media dug a deeper hole for himself that he subsequently blamed the media, not himself, for; the way he furthered distrust amongst his supporters for government over all, and so on, but still and all, the least little thing he could have done correctly, when faced with a challenge that harmed American lives, was show the least bit of a damn. 

Trump's supporters, some of whom seriously believe the vote was fiddled and Trump somehow won in a landslide that was snowed-in by fraudulent ballots, don't seem to know that 400,000 Americans dying because Trump was incompetent is bad, I guess. Some of them prefer his lies to the truth, and don't believe the death toll is real, either. It was the high testing, you know. The numbers looked bad because Trump was, I dunno. Willing to let them look bad. (As if!) And masks are bad, and state economies should be wide open--because liberty! And wolverines! And I guess, 1776. 

I've never been here to praise Trump, and I am not here to bury him either, because I do not believe this is even the last of the TWGB series, because the damage that men do lives long after they leave office, and he hasn't even left yet, and there is a lot of room for fuckery in the hours to come. But the worst he did was let 400,000 plus people die and didn't try to stop it. He tried to take credit for Operation Warp Speeding a vaccine into existence, but the distribution--the part that is the government's job--is fucked. 

At one term, two elections, no popular vote, the lowest polling of any modern president, and two impeachments, Trump is clearly a disaster.  Reputational salvage experts can swarm over this shipwreck forever looking for accomplishments to demonstrate that this was a hard-working and very masculine SOB, but what Trump mostly accomplished was watching his shows, golfing, and Tweeting. 

Anyway, Trump's golf game has probably never improved, he's been kicked, quite justifiably, off Twitter, and I for one, think it most apt if he just watched his dumb news shows, and was never a part of the news cycle again.

Especially after letting 400,000 plus of us die. I welcome a president who will mourn with us as he tries to correct this terrible tragedy.