The Meaningful Coincidence of Trump and Covid-19
Reckoning with the epic scale of Trump’s blight on America
Is it a meaningful coincidence that the Covid-19 pandemic is one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history and that it happened under President Trump’s watch?
To substantiate, let’s observe that the deadliest natural disaster in the US prior to Covid-19, in terms of isolated events, was the Galveston hurricane from 1900, which had a death toll of 6,000 to 12,000 people.
The deadliest pandemic was the Spanish flu which killed around 675,000 people in the US in 1918–1919. There was also the Asian flu in 1957–1958, killing between 70,000 to 116,000 people in the US, and the Hong Kong flu in 1968–1969, killing around 100,000 people in the US.
Currently, the American death toll from Covid-19 is over 90,000, and the number will likely pass 100,000. [As of Jan 20, 2021, the American death toll from Covid-19 has surpassed 400,000.]
To be sure, President Trump didn’t cause Covid-19 and he can’t be fairly blamed even for the entirety of the substandard American response to this pandemic. He’s partly to blame, though, as has been ably documented by the ghoulish mainstream news. See, for example, this Vox report: Trump ignored warnings, dismantled the team in…
