The crime of the century
Donald Trump insists that the Democrats stole the 2020 election. He calls it “the crime of the century.” That is a lie as big as they come, a dangerous, mean, and self-serving lie reflective of Donald Trump who is a champion liar, and as mean and self-serving a person as any villain that nineteenth century novelists like Dickens or Balzac could conjure up.
The truth is that Trump was the one that tried to steal the election by any means, including instigating a murderous attack on the U.S. Capitol, and Republican members of Congress helped him in that effort.
Trump lost by any measure and at every venue.
He lost the Electoral College vote by a clear margin.
He lost the popular vote by a huge margin.
He lost doubly in the assault on the Capitol, a double loss: the insurrection failed to stop the count, and everyone saw the extent to which Trump and his troops would resort to violence to deny reality, defy democracy, and substitute the people’s political will for their own.
Trump lost in his parliamentary ploy to prevent an honest Electoral College count despite the collusion of dozens of traitorous Republican members of Congress.
He lost in every court in the land his attorneys went before with their groundless claims. Some of their allegations were so outlandish that they were laughed out of court.
Trump lost with every major racial and ethnic demographic except among whites, which he won big.
He lost in the court of international public opinion.
There is only one exception to the Trump equals loser equation. A recent poll found that 67 percent of Republicans believe Trump’s Lie that Biden did not win legitimately. That means that more than two-thirds of Republicans are delusional! Trump is hopeless, irredeemable. The Republican Party is too. I have long thought that it cannot be reformed, only defeated and hopefully eventually demolished. The purge of Liz Cheney confirmed that in spades.
The Republicans lost in 2020 and could not accept or acknowledge it. It was inconceivable to them. The white party could not lose in what for them is a white nation. If that happens, as Trump has said, you have no country.
Whites have owned the United States since its foundation; it is their country as they see it, and they won’t lose it without a fight as dirty as it has to be. The white party, the Republicans, are now laying the groundwork for keeping it by stealing future elections, mainly by making it harder for people who won’t vote for them from exercising their political rights to demonstrate peacefully and to cast a ballot. The GOP is also purging the people who counted the votes honestly last time and putting more reliably Trump Republicans in their place. It is like a basketball game between the red team and the blue team, and the reds are picking the referees.
All this—the entire lawless Trump administration and its culmination, a violent insurrection based on a lie—would be the crime of the century at any other time. But Donald Trump and his Republican minions in state houses and legislatures perpetrated an even bigger crime.
The real crime of the century is the Covid genocide that might cost as many as a million Americans their lives by the times it is over. The official count of the dead is edging toward 600,000. An independent count by the prestigious University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) puts the actual number at 905,000. The count is still growing, although much more slowly since President Biden put science and reason in charge and threw out the bootlickers and the hacks.
Trump’s Covid catastrophe is the crime of the twenty-first century. Chief culprit: Donald Trump. He did everything possible to enable the spread of the virus and to torpedo everything that might have been done to slow or stop it.
The victims? Hundreds of thousands of Americans who would not have died if anybody but Trump and his supporting cast at the state level, led by our own Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had been in charge.
But there is more to it than the deaths, as reprehensible as is the fact that Trump played with death, indeed played on death’s team, and Americans lost their lives. Covid, like a nuclear bomb, spreads death, pain and sorrow in expansive circles. They are those who die immediately. There are those who survive, often after weeks of agonizing struggle, but never recover fully; the disease decreases the length and/or the quality of their lives. Then there is the concentric circle of sorrow and grief. For each death there is a network of mourning relatives and friends. How many? Millions.
Trump committed the crime of the century. I call it genocide not only because of the immense toll in death, disease, years of life and quality of life lost, and the vast circle of mourning. I call it genocide because the rhetoric and policies were deliberate, the seriousness and consequences were known to the President as he confessed to journalist Bob Woodward early in the pandemic. About this “confession” he could not lie because Woodward wisely taped the conversation. But Trump kept the knowledge from the American people, said the opposite of what he knew was true and thus induced the people to lower their guard, even tried to shame them into putting themselves at risk. He put a wrench in every effort to beat back the virus.
Why? Who really knows for sure? But I am convinced it is because Trump put a higher value on things other than saving lives, such as protecting his reelection by acting as if there was no problem and by saving his “great economy,” which he failed to do.
Trump has gone through a lifetime bullshitting people and getting away with it. He couldn’t do that with Covid-19. The virus has more than 19 ways to kill you. Trump tried to bullshit it away. The virus killed his presidency and nearly killed him.
There should be a tribunal to try Donald Trump and his chief accomplices for crimes against humanity. It won’t happen. Americans judge others, sometimes with good reason, as in Nuremberg, where the chief Nazis were judged. But we don’t judge ourselves for our crimes, which have been many. Where was the Nuremberg for the genocide of Native Americans; the war of aggression against Mexico and the vast theft of Mexican land; the enslavement of African people; the internment of Japanese Americans; the tortures inflicted after 9/11; the separation of families on the border; the wholesale transfer of weapons of mass destruction to Israel which uses them against Palestinian civilians to teach them a lesson: when we stomp on you, be quiet, don’t rebel or try to strike back. You have no country, no rights, your mosques mean nothing to us. Our temples are sacred. We are on top, you beneath us and our boots. The world’s superpower arms us and defends us when we commit atrocities. That’s reality. Bow your heads and live with it.
