August 4th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

It’s showing up in the obituaries.

People in the throes of agony from losing someone close to them are writing things like, “Instead of flowers, donate to a Democrat,“ or “instead of flowers, tell everyone to vote against Trump and the GOP this fall.“ It’s become a national trend.

But not everyone is mourning. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch and the multi-millionaires who comment on his Fox network every night are very happy with the giant tax cuts and deregulation that Donald Trump has given them.

In exchange for that, they’re giving support and publicity to Trump’s lies.

Trump’s lies about the coronavirus are encouraging older people who watch Murdoch’s Fox News and believe what they see to take chances and expose themselves to the virus and, as a result, they are dying all over the country.

And, as they die, the billionaires and giant, polluting corporations that have funded the Republican party since the Reagan revolution are literally getting rich on the pandemic. Their net wealth has increased by over $1 trillion just since the first of this year.

So, when we read about Trump bringing misleading and nonsensical graphs and charts - pieces of his Big Lie - to his interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, and then showing a complete lack of concern for dead and dying Americans and grieving families with a dismissive shrug and, “It is what it is,“ we have to keep in mind why he would do that.

First, of course, he doesn’t care about the lives of average Americans, but, more importantly, neither do the giant corporations and billionaires who helped put him in the office and keep virtually every Republican at every level of government in office across the country. Instead, their media empires are cranking out propaganda on the airwaves and the Internet to support Trump and his lies.

Meanwhile, the death cult that is now the Trump base are the saddest victims of the billionaire and corporate crusade to crush democracy and dismantle the American government. They’re the ones whose obituaries tragically point out how they believed Fox News and Donald Trump.

Until America once again constrains the political power of giant corporations and the billionaires they produce, Americans will continue to be gaslighted, forced into work situations that are dangerous, and die in massive numbers.

And the next sociopath the Republicans nominate for president in 2024 will almost certainly be far smarter, more confident, and more dangerous than Donald Trump.

The obituaries are telling us that in addition to getting rid of Trump and his Republican enablers, we must begin the hard work of deep structural change to reverse the billionaire coup of the 1980s that has brought us to this point.

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.