THE DEADLY BULLSHITTER

The news hit a little more than a week ago: COVID's death count surpassed that grim mark of one million. That one million figure exceeds the total population living in the five states of Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Delaware--plus Washington, DC. In fact, there's only ten U.S. cities whose population equals or exceeds that number, and the one million deaths from COVID is equivalent to the size of San Jose, CA., the nation's tenth largest city.

By the time 2021 rolled to a close, COVID was the third leading cause of death in the U.S., right behind heart disease and cancer.

And to top all of this off, demographers, data scientists, and public health experts have been warning us that the publicly reported figures on COVID deaths underestimate the number of people who've actually died from the virus, and that we probably passed that one million threshold as far back as December 2021. The COVID count, then, is tens of thousands--if not hundreds--higher than that one million figure.

Tragically, many of these deaths could have been avoided had it not been for the fact that, in the midst of a pandemic, the shots were being called by a killing president and dutifully carried out by one of the most slavish groups of enablers imaginable.

TRUMP, THE KILLING PRESIDENT

There's little doubt that the 45th President, Donald J. Trump, ought to loom large in any narrative about the ways in which the pandemic rapidly spread and ended up causing such a massive number of deaths, many of which could have been avoided. That avoidance, however, would've required the very characteristics that were lacking in Trump and his cabal of sycophants -- a respect for science, a commitment to truthfulness, and a determination to prioritize the health of the populace. Instead, in the pit of the pandemic and subsequent recession, we were saddled with a President who openly mocked mask wearing, held events that became super spreaders, never let up on his White nationalist ramblings, and persisted in pushing the most putrid kind of populism imaginable.

And, on top of all of that, he revealed himself to be an inveterate liar or, as Matthew Yglesias dubbed him, the nation's bullshitter-in-chief. Trump's lies and bullshitting is undeniable and part of the public record. On February 7th, 2020, for instance, Trump said the following about COVID to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward: "This stuff is deadly. You just breath the air, and that's how it's passed."

On February 24, just two weeks after speaking to Woodward, tweeted, "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA."

Three days later, February 27th, here's what the public gets: "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA."

And here he is on March 10th: "And we're prepared, and we're doing it a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."

So, even though he appears to get the seriousness of the situation in his private conversation with Woodward, he--that is, Trump-- elects to downplay this seriousness in his public statements. His fear of how the calamity unleashed by the pandemic might upend his reelection prospects, his consistent refrains about how all of this was under control, his open hostility toward scientific findings that he suspected might derail his dreams of White nationalist rule-- all of this combined to make a bad situation worse, to unnecessarily up COVID's body count.

Trump, then, revealed himself as a killer president. A commander-in-chief who deeply betrayed the people who he was supposed to protect. A liar whose tales combined with an already degraded public health infrastructure to dump fuel on flames that grew into a fire rageous enough to burn life out of millions of households.

Whenever his name is mentioned, we have a duty to the dead to remember him as one of the most toxic and deadly bullshitters to have ever occupied the office of the presidency.

Catch you on the flip side,

Doc Greene