Last month, I
wrote that president Trump had admitted to a crime against humanity. It was true. The president had openly
bragged about deliberately slowing down COVID-19 testing for political gain, thereby causing the deaths of untold numbers of Americans to make himself look better. It is a monstrous crime for which he has not yet been held accountable.
But a
new report from
Vanity Fair implicates both Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner of an unspeakable horror orders of magnitude greater. Instead of implementing a comprehensive and aggressive national testing plan as originally recommended by the White House coronavirus task force, Kushner scuttled it. The president and his son-in-law were instead content to allow tens of thousands of Americans die as long as they were mostly people of color, and hailing from Democratic states and counties. Not only that, they saw it as a political opportunity to both cull the numbers of opposing voters and lay blame on Democratic governors at the same time: ...
If this is true–and there is very little reason to doubt its veracity, despite the White House press secretary’s denials–it would constitute perhaps the greatest crime against humanity of any president in American history. Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears was more deliberately vicious and murderous; George W. Bush’s immoral war of choice in Iraq
killed more people overall.
But no American president has ever betrayed his oath of office more profoundly than in deliberately allowing the deaths of more than 150,000 of his own fellow citizens and counting for partisan political gain.
We even lack the vocabulary to describe it. “Gross negligence” doesn’t reach the level of the crime. “Murder” is lurid, but frankly not comprehensive enough in scope to describe the death of 150,000. “Treason” comes to mind when considering that the President of the United States knowingly allowed 150,000 Americans to die because they were mostly his political opponents–but despite his Russia entanglements, there is no direct evidence he did so on behalf of a foreign power.