July 28th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Back on March 24, when Americans were just beginning to start dying from Covid in substantial numbers, I asked the question, “Why?”

Why did Trump initially procrastinate for two months?

Was he trying to squeeze a few months extra revenue out of his hotels?

Was it that he was watching Fox News and believing their spin, and then echoing it himself which caused Fox to pick it up and feed it back to him even more? Was he creating a deadly rightwing media feedback loop without even realizing it?

Was it so his billionaire buddies could unload all their stocks before things crashed?

Was it because at some weird level Donald Trump actually wants to destroy America? And, if that’s the case, why does he want to destroy this country? For who’s benefit?

Was it because he knew that it would hit the economy and hurt his reelection chances and he thought maybe, just maybe you could just push his way through this?

Why did Trump delay?

“It’s going to cost tens of thousands of lives,” I wrote back in March, “deaths that were completely unnecessary, and wreak massive damage to our healthcare system and the people who work in it.”

Why, I asked, did he decide to do that, when he could see other countries getting this thing under control at the same time that Italy failed to because they followed policies similar to his? Why?

Here we are four months and 150,000 people dead later, and we’re all still asking the same question: “Why?“

America still deserves an answer.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.