Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Trump’s Latest Failure Could Kill 6 Million Americans

September 17, 2020

President Donald J. Trump gestures to a Covid-19 graphic on a video screen during a press conference Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2020 (The White House)

By Thom Hartmann

Although they haven’t yet publicly acknowledged it in such stark terms, it’s clear now that the Trump administration has decided pursue a herd immunity strategy to deal with the coronavirus.

Trump’s new White House advisor on coronavirus, Scott Atlas, has said it on numerous occasions in multiple venues, and now our Attorney General, Bill Barr, is trying to argue that lockdowns to prevent the spread of the virus are as bad as slavery.

Trying to achieve herd immunity in the United States against the coronavirus, assuming it’s even possible, would involve between two and 6 million Americans dying.

And that’s just the deaths. People who survive coronavirus often have heart damage, strokes, dementia, severe chronic fatigue, and long-lasting damage to other organs. With a herd immunity strategy, tens of millions of Americans will be suffering these consequences, perhaps for the rest of their lives.

But if you’d rather play golf and watch Fox News than govern a country, herd immunity is the easiest way to get past a pandemic.

The CDC, apparently on the orders of Trump’s political toadies like Dr. Atlas, has stopped advising states to have mask mandates when their infection rates spike. When its director, Dr. Robert Redfield, tried to tell America that we should all be wearing masks, Trump went out and contradicted him.

At the same time, Republicans in both the House and Senate are refusing to do anything that might help people affected by this crisis, in the bizarre belief that cutting off aid to people will force them back into the workplace.

For some baffling reason, the media is largely ignoring this story. Perhaps it’s because it’s so hard to believe that the President of the United States would think letting 6 million Americans die, and tens of millions of Americans suffer permanent disabilities, is the right thing to do.

But this is the same guy who brought us a failed steak company, a failed vodka company, a failed airline, a failed school, several failed casinos, and even a real estate empire that was failing so badly it had to be bailed out by foreign oligarchs multiple times.

Trump doesn’t know how to run a business, so we shouldn’t be surprised that he doesn’t know how to run a country. His latest failure, tragically, is the United States of America.

But running a bunch of companies into the ground doesn’t cause the death of millions of human beings. Now the stakes have been radically raised.

Trump’s new “herd mentality“ strategy for dealing with the coronavirus is beyond incompetent: it’s evil.

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.