Breaking News/Analysis: The monster speaks

The revelations in Rage, Bob Woodward’s book about Trump, documented by a priceless set of tapes in the president’s own voice, is best seen as the voluntary confession of a criminal, as if O.J. Simpson had given the police a “how and why I did it” interview.

But Trump’s guilt cuts much deeper: At worst, Simpson killed two people. Trump’s deliberate lack of action against Covid-19, his orchestrating events most likely to spread the scourge, his urging people to attend super-spreader political rallies, his mocking of people for practicing the basic safety measures—social distancing and masking—his bullying everybody into opening the economy and the society wide as if inviting the virus to enter, and his own refusal to set the example by wearing a mask, are responsible for the deaths of at least tens of thousands and perhaps ultimately hundreds of thousands of people.

This is homicide on a mass scale. Take all the people who died needlessly because of the miserable, mad existence of Charles Manson, include the assistance of his fan base very like Trump’s cult, then multiply that by a factor of 10,000 or 100,000, and you get an approximation of the scale of Trump’s culpability.

That is only on one issue. All his other crimes or attempted crimes—against immigrant children and families, against racial justice, against even a minimal measure of economic fairness, against a bare bones start on universal health care like Obamacare—are things history will charge Trump with when we are finally rid of this beast and he is long dead and gone.