No lives matter to Donald Trump

“Black lives matter.”

Some people are eager to get Donald Trump to say those three words. He refuses. But what is the point anyway? The whole thing is the definition of futility.

I understand the intent. Stating a thing is part of the way toward making it come true. Once you admit that black lives matter, your actions can be judged against that belief, including by your own conscience. Moreover, if it becomes a kind of mantra that almost everyone feels a desire or a need to utter, people in all sorts of roles, from politicians, to prosecutors, to employers and cops can be judged against the statement. And, if a nation’s leader says black lives matter it sets an example for the people, and his subsequent words and actions better be consistent with that ideal or he or she will be denounced as a liar and a hypocrite.

It is only important, however, when a leader has moral standing and is sincere. Otherwise, who would believe it or follow the example. And, hey, we are not talking of Nelson Mandela here. When I thought about Donald Trump’s moral standing, with all his cruelty and after all the evil he has done and espoused, I thought you would have to use a concept like negative infinity that can stand for the abyss. But I did not know if the concept “negative infinity” even existed, and if it did it had to be part of that area of mathematics of which I know about as much as Trump knows about medicine. Unlike the president, I do not like to make a fool of myself, so I googled it.

This is what google said: “In mathematics, the affinely extended real number system is obtained from the real number system ℝ by adding two elements: + ∞ and − ∞ (read as positive infinity and negative infinity respectively).”

I got the idea, even though in my life I have never heard of the “affinely extended real number system.” But now I know where I can put the moral standing of that Unidentified Frigging Object, Donald Trump, on a map:  − ∞, read as negative infinity.

[I know this may seem as an unnecessary flourish on my part, even a bit of intellectual showing off. That is not the point; believe it when I say I graduated high school only because I managed to pass Algebra II with a D- average. The point is that Donald Trump speaks about himself simply in self-aggrandizing superlatives, like the best economy, the most testing, stable genius. You don’t bring a knife to a fight with a guy with an M-16, and you don’t counter Trump with tame words but with smart, tough ideas like pegging his moral standing at negative infinity.]

Picking back up on the main thread, as well-intentioned as it is, it’s a fool’s errand trying to get Trump to utter the mantra of what I want to call the Novel Movement for Racial Justice. The iconic words of the civil rights movement of a couple of generations ago—“We Shall Overcome”—have never come out of his mouth. And, today, he is nastier and more racist than ever, so fuhgeddaboudit, as the New Yorkers say.

The larger point is this: other people’s lives–black, Latino, Asian, Native American, immigrant, or even white—are not important to Donald Trump. That fiasco of a rally in Tulsa established that Donald Trump is willing to risk the lives of his mostly older, monolithically white, most rabid supporters in the vain hope that a big crowd would be like CPR for a campaign with dwindling oxygen levels. Black lives matter? No lives matter to Donald Trump when stacked up against his own interests.

That the Trump Tulsa rally, which drew a smaller crowd than expected, was an embarrassment for Trump, suggests there might be still a bit of poetic justice in the world. The event might as well have been designed as party time for the Coronavirus. An enclosed arena. Many people sitting close together for a prolonged time. Only a small minority, seating in the rafters, making even an attempt at social distancing. Many older folks. Virtually no one wearing a mask. A state in which infections are spiking. If you wanted to design a super-spreader event, you could not do better than this.

Black lives matter? Lives do not matter to Trump, except his own and, I assume, that of the members of his family. Period. In Tulsa, he proved that even white lives matter zero to him. Given his actions and policies, the clear conclusion is that the lives of those who are not white or well-off matter even less, below zero.

The evidence? Why otherwise move heaven and earth to deny health care coverage to millions of people by abolishing Obamacare? Why cut food stamps when there are so many hungry people in a country that Trump claimed (falsely) with the best economy in history?

These policies and others that Trump and the Republicans have instituted were lethal long before Covid-19 came along. When an ideology lacking in decency and humanity, like dog-eat-dog capitalism, meets a pandemic, terrible things happen. The human toll goes up exponentially.

It does not happen in countries where solidarity and lives matter more than profits, like Iceland and New Zealand, countries where the leaders realize that in a grave public health emergency  you must put in charge of fighting it those people who know a lot about that kind of thing, experts, doctors and scientists, instead  of political hacks. That is, if you want to avoid disaster.

Trump courts disaster, and finally he has gotten himself and us into a real big one: the calamity of 122,000 Covid-19 deaths, many of them unnecessary, in just a few months, with many more to come. Trump is so delusional that he thinks this whole debacle is a success story.

This is what you get in a pandemic in a rich society with a pathetic social infrastructure, a mercenary health care system, an ideology that systematically blames the victim, deep structural inequality and prejudices along the lines of race, class, and national origin. That’s what you get when you elect a Donald Trump who is a highly opinionated person, which means not that he has strong opinions but that he is someone who perfectly fits the dictionary description of the term: “conceitedly assertive and dogmatic in one’s opinions.”

The Coronavirus caught the world by surprise, many countries and leaders initially made mistakes, and it became a global pandemic. But the leaders of only two major countries in the world opened the door wide for the virus to come in and wreak havoc. The conceitedly assertive and dogmatic in his (ill-founded) views Donald Trump of the United States and Brazil’s unspeakable Jairo Bolsonaro, who would rather let the Amazon burn and the Earth boil than curtail the profits of corporate agriculture.

If there were such a place as hell, which I don’t believe in, I would wish these two oafs to reside in hell for ∞.