It’s May 23, 2020, as I write this. There have been 96,836 deaths in the United States. This won’t appear on The Cud for a few days, maybe a week; you can be sure that we’ll top 100,000 by then. It’s not a record to be proud of, and it’s a death toll that was completely avoidable.

I’ve made some bold, harsh statements about Donald Trump during the first forty months of his disastrous presidency. All of it pales in comparison to this statement: Trump is guilty of genocide.

Too far, you think? NO.

In the wake of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, President Barack Obama created the Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense — what is often referred to as the “pandemic response team” — in 2016. Its mission was “to prepare for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic.” Pretty straightforward, right?

Fast forward to spring 2018. Donald Trump brought in John Bolton to head the National Security Council, and Trump/Bolton disbanded the team, moving staff to other NSC departments. Tim Ziemer, the Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biothreats, finding himself without a team to direct, resigned. Trump framed it as making everything better and removing duplicate departments, but we were left with “no single official at the highest levels of the administration who focuses only on global health security,” as The Hill reported in May 2018.

Trump said the move was for financial reasons. In February 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic spreading across the globe, he defended the decision by saying “Some of the people we cut, they haven't been used for many, many years.” Well, of course not; we don’t have pandemics every day. That’s the whole point of a pandemic response team — to be there for WHEN we need them. And I’m sure that, while there wasn’t a pandemic, those 430 reported people were always planning, always monitoring the world, so that the United States would be ready when the next pandemic hit.

Trump did away with what he saw as a waste of payroll. Look at us now; we were grossly unprepared, and Americans have died because of it. Had the team remained, Trump would have had earlier warnings. Of course, even if he had, would he have listened? Probably not; he hasn’t listened to ANY experts about the pandemic so far. And he took two months longer than he should have to take this thing seriously. Consider the following:

Dec. 31: China informs the World Health Organization of the initial outbreak. Had the pandemic response team been in place, it would have acted immediately on this news.

Jan. 7: China identifies the virus as a new type of coronavirus, the same kind that caused the original SARS outbreak. This would have kicked our team into overdrive.

Jan. 11: First death in China from the virus.

Jan. 13: First infection outside China (in Thailand). This is a landmark date, because the virus has escaped China entirely. This was the time to immediately lock down the country and stop all incoming flights except to return Americans, who should then have been quarantined.

Jan. 21: First U.S. confirmed case. The coronavirus is here, and Trump ignored it.

Jan. 22: Trump tells CNBC “we have it totally under control.” Lie or self-delusion?

Jan. 23: China locks down.

Jan. 30: The World Health Organization declares a global emergency.

Feb. 2: Trump tells Sean Hannity he’d shut down entry of foreign nationals who’d visited China — except for those from Hong Kong and Macau, for no sane reason.

Feb. 24: Trump tweets that it’s all under control. Another lie, and that same day he asked the House for $1.25 billion to fight the outbreak.

Feb. 25: Trump tweets about what a GREAT job his administration is doing handling the outbreak, but still no lockdown. He also tweeted that “So far, by the way, we have not had one death.” And he said that the coronavirus was “a problem that’s going to go away.”

Feb. 27: While the Centers for Disease Control was saying that the virus was going to spread across the nation, Trump said “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Because the president knows better than the entire national agency full of people who are experts in this area? Or does he just believe in miracles?

Feb. 29: First known death in the U.S. (we would later learn that a death on Feb. 6 was from coronavirus). Wait, what about “under control” and “GREAT job” and “we have not had one death” and “a problem that’s going to go away” and “like a miracle, it will disappear”? Apparently, wishful thinking and lies aren’t enough to stop a rampant pandemic. Who would have imagined that? I’ll t you: EVERYONE who has basic reasoning skills.

March 2: Trump questioned whether a flu vaccine would work against the coronavirus. He disbelieves in climate change and thinks that exercise uses up a finite amount of energy a human body has in its lifetime, so it’s no surprise that he doesn’t understand something that most of us learned in high school.

March 8: Trump tweets that “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on coronavirus.” What plan? Where? Care to share it? Care to begin executing it? No, apparently.

March 9: Trump says the flu was worse, continuing to dismiss the outbreak, even as experts in his own government continue to warn about it.

March 10: Trump actually tells reporters that what had happened was unexpected, but “Just stay calm. It will go away.” It was NOT unexpected; it was COMPLETELY expected. And it will not go away, no matter how calm everyone is.

March 13: Trump declares a national emergency. This is the second landmark date, two calendar months to the day since the first case was identified outside China.

After more than two months of dismissing the pandemic entirely, he finally did the bare minimum. And he’s done little more since then, besides giving misinformation about fabled treatments and cures, making empty promises that are never fulfilled, recommending things in opposition to the experts, and dragging his feet to anything accomplished. He has ignored pleadings from states. He has treated the whole thing as nothing more than an economic inconvenience.

As soon as the coronavirus spread out of China, any idiot knows what should have been done. Any idiot knows that we should have shut down all entry into this country except for returning Americans, and then those Americans should have been quarantined on arrival. Any idiot knows that this is how you stop a pandemic in its tracks. It’s very simple: Keep infected people away from uninfected people. Any idiot gets that.

But Donald Trump isn’t just any idiot. He’s the King of Idiots. Whether motivated by stupidity, greed, ego, or naïveté, he did nothing while the pandemic overran this nation. We now have nearly a third of the world’s confirmed COVID-19 cases and a third of its confirmed deaths. And, let’s be honest, I think we know that for Trump it was ALL of the above: He constantly displays general stupidity; his love affair with the economy is less about Americans’ well-being and more about his monetary interests; his ego is as bloated as his body; and he’ll believe anything that supports what he wants to do.

It’s the usual Trump modus operandi, but this time it really mattered. Don’t get me wrong: All the terrible things that he’s done to affect the freedom or civil rights of common decency of so many people matter, but his criminal ignorance of the pandemic has mattered because it has resulted in the deaths of nearly 100,000 Americans, and the meter is climbing.

A terrible thought keeps running through my mind. I imagine that, behind closed doors, Trump revels in the huge numbers of deaths in urban areas, because that means more likely losses in an electorate that wouldn’t vote for him. I have no proof of this, but that part of me that knows that Trump is evil enough to ignore and enable the deaths of a hundred thousand people could very well be rooting for the deaths of Democrats. Just the notion is sickening, but a man who would callously do nothing while people’s lives are at risk means that I can’t get that “what if” out of my mind.

Being president isn’t just about having a grand time being the most powerful man in the world. As we learned in a superhero movie, with great power comes great responsibility. Donald Trump keeps fighting to not be held accountable for anything — to be considered above the law merely because he’s president. This isn’t right. A president must be held politically accountable for his missteps and legally accountable for his crimes. He should be held accountable for every failure on his way to 100,000 dead bodies — every deliberate ignoring of the facts, every intentional inaction, every lie he told us and himself along the way to not combat the pandemic, every time he didn’t do what he was supposed to do to protect the populace of the nation.

He won’t, of course. No one will ever hold him accountable. He’ll live out his days — rich, fat, and happy — and get away with it.

Each of these 100,000 deaths — and counting — was preventable. All it would have taken were a few simple actions: listening to the experts, locking down the nation, stopping anyone from coming in, and quarantining those who return from abroad. That’s it. That simple. Any idiot could have avoided this.

But not the King of Idiots. He’s responsible for those deaths. And having that many dead bodies qualifies as genocide. Murder requires intent, and refusing to act when you must is intent. Legal terms like “negligent homicide” and “involuntary manslaughter” cover this ground. So call it negligent genocide or involuntary genocide if you must; either way, Trump is responsible.

So, congratulations, my fellow Americans! For forty hellish months, we’ve endured the worst president we’ve ever seen. We’ve lived through astounding levels of stupidity, arrogance, and greed. We’ve witnessed nonstop dishonesty, diversion, and deflection. We’ve watched in shock as he’s divided America like never before, broken the law repeatedly and without consequences, and lived entirely in his fantasy world. We’ve suffered as he has upended our Constitution, taken target practice on our democracy, and treated our republic like his personal playhouse. But now, he’s topped all of that. Call it genocide, call it a hundred thousand cases of involuntary manslaughter… whatever it is, we have a president who is a mass murderer.

I just won’t crack any jokes about whether Trump ought to face a similar fate. I bet I’d be held accountable for any perceived threat on the president — while he’ll walk free from negligent genocide.

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FURTHER READING

I don’t usually cite news stories for opinion pieces, but at the end of this article I will, because it’s vital that anyone reading this understands exactly what happened — factually, indisputably, beyond anything that you might think is just my opinion. Here are some key things to review. These are legitimate outlets reporting facts.

Snopes fact-checked a timeline that circulated online about what Trump did and said. I’ve noted several key things in my timeline above, but read this exhaustive fact check to really feel your gut twist and your blood chill:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/timeline-trump-covid19-responses/

ABC News has a nice timeline of events:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/timeline-coronavirus-started/story?id=69435165

So does Business Insider:
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timeline-history-major-events-2020-3

Snopes confirms what was a “rumor” about the pandemic response team’s disbanding in a recent check:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

Story from 2018 about Ziemer resigning:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/

Piece by March 2020 by the former Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense on the White House National Security Council:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-trump-closed/2020/03/13/a70de09c-6491-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html

PolitiFact cut through the misinformation; Trump didn’t fire the team members, but they were sent elsewhere and were never replaced:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/28/michael-bloomberg/did-donald-trump-fire-pandemic-officials-defund-cd/

USA Today, noting when Trump tried to say it wasn’t his decision. I guess the buck doesn’t stop with him:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/18/coronavirus-did-president-trumps-decision-disband-global-pandemic-office-hinder-response/5064881002/

Business Insider ran a great piece in February, when Trump was praising China for containing the coronavirus, outlining the programs he cut that affected our response to it:
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-cuts-programs-responsible-for-fighting-coronavirus-2020-2

Tim Morrison, a Trump advisor for three and a half whole months who now works for the conservative think tank the Hudson Institute (which should tell you all you need to know about him), wrote an opinion piece in WashPost about how Trump did NOT dissolve the pandemic response team, and how other things Trump did with reorganization made it better. But Above the Law correct Morrison’s interpretation nicely here:
https://abovethelaw.com/2020/03/donald-trump-didnt-disband-pandemic-team-he-did-far-worse/

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.