DROP DEAD: Trump To Seniors. Expendable Elders, 80% Of Covid Deaths Over 65
'Trump to Seniors: Drop Dead.' In lieu of a plan for the virus, the president keeps assuring audiences that "only" older people will die. By Mitchell Zimmerman, Common Dreams, Oct. 22, 2020.
-Deadly infection flames across an entire nation like a wildfire, the times demand leadership. Trump ran the other way.
I’m of the generation that was born during World War II. We’re now in our mid-to-late 70s. We were a little pre-boomer, but many of us joined or led the rights revolutions of the 1960s, struggled against the Vietnam War, and hoped to make the world more just, generous, and joyous. That was then. Now, inexplicable though this seems to me, we usually tilt Republican. But that may be changing. Polls now show the president trailing Joe Biden by double digits among seniors. Why? Perhaps it’s because, for Donald Trump, we’re simply expendable.
As President Trump’s bungled response to the pandemic has become more evident, our cohort, even including the conservatives among us, has seen that the price of Trump’s failure of leadership is death. It was March when Texas Republican leader Dan Patrick set out the GOP’s go-gently-into-the-night approach to elders. He proposed it would be noble for us to take our chances on death by coronavirus if that’s what it takes to keep the economy humming, which Trump and the Republicans saw as the key to re-election.
What could possibly be more important?
At the time, fewer than 500 Americans had died of COVID-19. Now, seven months later, well over 220,000 Americans have succumbed due to Trump’s mishandling of the contagion. Eighty percent of the dead were over 65. When a deadly infection flames across an entire nation like a wildfire, the times demand leadership. Trump ran the other way. When difficulties arose with our coronavirus testing, he declared: “I don’t take responsibility at all.” When shortages of PPE and medical materials plagued the states, he told governors on a conference call this spring: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves. We’re not a shipping clerk.”
Trump had no plan for the pandemic then, and he doesn’t have one now. He recently told supporters in Arizona he was “tired” of talking about the pandemic. But then no plan is needed, in Trump’s considered opinion, since the pandemic is a “hoax.” The virus, he has counseled, is “totally harmless” in 99 percent of cases. “Don’t be afraid of COVID-19,” he offered. “When you catch it, you get better.” Of course, 220,000 people died and will never get better. Such people are, in the presidential view, apparently not worth thinking about.
Trump explained this last month: Coronavirus “affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems . . . That’s it. You know, in some states, thousands of people, nobody young.”
But Trump’s response is even worse than ignorant denial, neglect, and indifference. For months Trump aggressively campaigned against the efforts of public health authorities to control the virus, dividing the country and sabotaging their efforts to control the pandemic...
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/22/trump-seniors-drop-dead
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