Thom Hartmann For Buzzflash: Will Forcing Kids And Teachers Back To School Be Trump’s Waterloo?

July 9th 2020

Donald Trump speaking with supporters at an "An Address to Young Americans" event hosted by Students for Trump and Turning Point Action at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona (Gage Skidmore)

By Thom Hartmann

Trump’s first major policy change on his first full day as president was to gut implementation of the “Waters of America“ Act.

His change allowed coal mines and factories to increase their profits by dumping massive amounts of poison in our rivers and waterways.

He got away with it because he only poisoned the people downstream of our waterways, and so only a few million people had their children neurologically damaged by things like mercury. His action will be diluted by time itself: it’ll only produce a few hundred thousand cases of cancer, and those will come about in a scattershot fashionover the next few decades.

But now that he is trying to force every school in America to open in the next few weeks, he’s threatening to “poison” every school in America with COVID-19, which will very rapidly hit over a hundred million Americans both directly and indirectly.

Trump has gotten away with closing or weakening over 100 different federal regulatory agencies that protect people from being poisoned, defrauded, or otherwise harmed by bad corporate actors and grifters.

But each one of those agencies only protected a slice of America, so there was never a large and loud enough response to his policies to capture the attention of virtually all of the American people.

Even his decision to do nothing about a foreign power paying bounties to kill American soldiers only directly affected military families.

But this school policy will hit a massive number of people, and do so in a very short period of time.

For the first time, tens of millions and maybe over a hundred million Americans will all realize at the same time that Trump’s incompetence and malice could lead to their own illness or even death.

Which raises the question: will this be Trump’s Waterloo, and cripple the ability of Republican elected officials on both the state and federal level to get reelected?

Or will he simply get away with another outrage and a few hundred thousand more dead Americans?

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting 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.