Mass murder. Dress it up any way you like, but in the end, that is what it is. It might not seem as ugly as other incidents of slaughter in history, but for the victims the outcome is precisely the same and this, like each of those, flows from empowering the worst among us.
If there were justice in the world, if Trump & his enablers in the federal government & state governors were judged & held liable as are corporate CEOs or those who commit mass murder in most other ways, they would spend the rest of their lives in prison...if they were lucky.
As with so much else with the Trump Admin, we must push back on efforts to normalize the way he has handled this pandemic as a "policy response." It was also not "negligent." It was deliberately taking steps sure to kill many thousands...to advance personal political objectives.
If you do not call it mass murder, the slaughter of what may be hundreds of thousands of our neighbors due to systematic spread of disinformation, repression of facts, failure to deploy essential assets and resources, then you are misrepresenting what has happened.
(It is not just because I am, at times, a writer or an editor. Rather it is because I also write & read about history that I feel compelled to emphasize how important the words we use to describe Trump & his failures & abuses are. He is the enemy of truth. We must serve it.
Choosing to frame it as normal or using words that normalize the grossly abnormal and downright evil or corrupt is rendering a verdict to future generations that is misleading. It is unjust. It raises the possibility it will happen again.)
