There has been a lot of chatter this past week about Trump’s refusal to concede and how that particular act may be damaging his legacy.
These chatterers have missed the obvious: Trump’s legacy was settled when he deliberately underplayed the virus, when he then contradicted his own medical advisors on what to do about it, when he held a rally in Tulsa last June 20 and followed that asininity with four months of similar events, and when he instructed his Chief-of-Staff to apprise us of the fact that the Administration had stopped fighting the virus—thank you and good night.
Legacy? His will be easy. Human life is cheap. And human beings—save one—are expendable. He believes it, his Senatorial bootlickers believe it, and if 70 million people voted for him and did so in a state of consciousness, they believe it too.
It’s doubtful that Trump or his followers will contest that, for he is nothing more or less than he always has been—a promoter, advocate, and cheerleader for Donald Trump.
You may remember that last spring he declared himself a wartime president. It’s time to reexamine that in light of his so-called legacy. Several presidents have ruled in wartime: Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ, both Bushes—they all had to give the awful command that sent Americans into harm’s way. And they suffered for it. You can hear it in the speeches they made and the letters they wrote filled with regret and empathy.
I bring that up not to make some sort of stretch between the Coronavirus and a foreign adversary, but because Trump, our self-appointed wartime president, fought no war but instead gave succor to the enemy (Remember “liberate Michigan”?), ignored his generals and advisors (Remember “Time to #FireFauci”?) then proceeded to surrender. And as the casualties of this war mounted, instead of expressing sadness and regret for American lives lost, he ignored them and dismissed the enemy itself as a hoax.
We all know what the phrase “a death in the family” means, because we’ve all been there. We know it’s more than an obituary or a wake or a procession to the cemetery. It’s a loss at the core of a group and a sadness that recurs without warning. The realization of what it all means is a basic human tenet—one which even animals share. Yet Trump doesn’t. If you don’t believe it, watch his Rose Garden announcement on November 13 where he hyped the vaccine, attacked a sitting governor, and lauded his own contribution in the vaccine’s speedy development. Never once did he express sympathy for the quarter of a million Americans already dead—never once did he express a wish that it could have saved some lives earlier. He doesn’t feel that. It doesn’t affect him.
His legacy? Human life is cheap. Donald Trump didn’t value the lives of the common man who idolized him, supported him, defended him. He felt no more empathy for the 70 million who voted for him than he did for the 75 million who didn’t. They're all expendable. Oh there’ll be another abomination or two before he’s gone, another grift, another swindle, another middle finger to America, but his legacy is set. In stone. No worries there.
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