Trump Has Caused Over 186,000 American Deaths

No, don’t worry, I am not crazy. But Maria Cardona is! Ms. Cardona is the author of a screed entitled “A Trump victory promises 4 more years of American carnage,” which a supposedly mainstream quasi-news outlet called The Hill saw fit to publish under the label “Opinion.” 

In case you are wondering where Cardona’s numbers come from — as if you couldn’t guess — here is the relevant sentence from her very own “opinion essay”:

Let’s start with the obvious: Trump’s ongoing mishandling of the coronavirus has led to the deaths of more than 186,000 Americans.

That sentence is absolutely unambiguous in its implications: All of the 186,000 deaths in the U.S. this year which have been officially certified as coronavirus fatalities may be blamed on Donald Trump directly. Do not be tempted to save Cardona from her own insanity by pretending she did not mean it “that way.” She certainly did. Notice that her sentence is not saying that the coronavirus has “led to the deaths of 186,000 Americans.” It is explicitly saying that Trump’s mishandling of the virus has “led to” all of these deaths. If Trump had not mishandled the pandemic, she is claiming, none of those 186,000 people would have died from the coronavirus.

Barack Obama was president for eight years, during which, we may conservatively estimate, following U.S. CDC averages, more than 300,000 Americans died of influenza. What did Obama (not to mention his leading infectious diseases expert, Anthony Fauci) do to stave off all that “carnage”? I do not seem to remember any lockdowns, any federal mask mandates, any shutting down of the economy, any bans on social gatherings over one person, or any forced quarantine for anyone thought to have lived within a hundred miles of a person who might have coughed during the preceding four months, being enforced, or even proposed, by anyone in the Obama administration during all those eight deadly years of viral carnage. Maybe I just missed the news that day.

And let us not forget that the Obama carnage was caused by his “mishandling” of a very well-known and utterly predictable event, the annual flu season. There was no surprise involved, no “unprecedented” virus from who-knows-where. Everyone knew these annual waves of death were coming, during all eight years of his presidency. Was Obama so craven in his self-concern and wanton disregard for human life that he simply did not care that hundreds of thousands of people — who of course, like this year’s coronavirus victims, may be presumed to have been comfortably on their way to immortality before they contracted the virus that felled them — were losing their lives to the flu on his watch? Lives — hundreds of thousands of them — that he personally could have saved if only he had bothered to do so, by simply shutting down the entire country indefinitely. After all, what is a little crippling poverty, untreated life-threatening cancer, social isolation, increased suicide, the general crushing of the national spirit, and the devaluing of the dignity, freedom, and courage of three hundred million people, when there were American deaths to be prevented?

If Trump’s mishandling of coronavirus has “led to” the deaths of more than 186,000, then in the name of logical and moral consistency, we must conclude that Obama’s even more egregious mishandling — remember, his virus had no element of surprise in it — “led to” the deaths of more than 300,000. 

Or we could go back to square one, and just assume that Maria Cardona is crazy. 

Or perhaps this tidbit from Ms. Cardona’s bio, found at the bottom of her op-ed at The Hill, might help to explain the apparent lack of logical and moral consistency: “Maria Cardona is a longtime Democratic strategist and was co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee for the party’s 2020 convention.”

Very useful opinion there.


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