The MAGA President Remade America as a Shithole Country

If COVID-19 is a war against the “China Virus,” as Trump insists, America lost miserably. 

The nation is quarantined, fearful of a virus raging uncontrollably because the president surrendered. The 160,000 lost souls so far have already surpassed American deaths in every overseas war save World War II.  

This is, as Nancy Pelosi has said, the “Trump Virus” because this administration actually facilitated its spread. Authoritarian tweets aren’t the only third-world reality of his presidency; a deliberate anti-science policy begat a festering illiteracy and evisceration of our public health. We are now the shithole country in the toilet—not the shining city on the hill—thanks to the president’s disinterest in protecting Americans. Our passports are a red flag to the world because of the failure to mitigate the infection rate here. 

As Katherine Eban’s reporting crystallized, Trump, Jared Kushner and company wilfully denied vital health care and equipment to Democratic-majority states and cities. By refusing to activate a genuine national emergency plan, Trump immobilized America at the initial epicenters of the crisis, and quickly left us with the world’s worst pandemic response. At every turn, Trump incited civil unrest rather than encourage a disciplined and united approach to social distancing. 

There is more to blame than Trump alone. Gov. Andrew Cuomo likewise ignored the body counts in China and Europe to initially downplay the pandemic’s deadliness. But Cuomo eventually followed the science instead of gaslighting, and a governor is not a president. 

After I called out Trump’s genocidal negligence on cable television last weekend, his cultists trolled my inbox. There is nothing that makes them more madly defensive than the guilt of supporting a treasonous wartime president, under whose watch there have been scores of thousands of preventable deaths, and whose day of reckoning awaits on November 3. 

What upsets them most is direct and truthful language. They know but won’t admit Trump is responsible for the greatest homeland insecurity in U.S. history. First attacking disproportionately Black Americans in metropolises, the virus has now spread all across rural and suburban parts. 

Public health and the survival of our democracy are not supposed to be partisan issues. They are in 2020. Since Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a GOP super-donor, began defunding the USPS and instituting new rules to end overtime and curtail delivery hours, Americans have reported extreme delays and suspensions in Democratic-voting cities. As The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, many people in majority-Black zip codes can no longer rely on getting paychecks, medication, and other essentials delivered; their votes are similarly endangered. 

There’s no need for Democrats on the Hill to invite DeJoy to deliver song-and-dance testimony. It’s self-evident that he is attempting to ratfuck, on Trump’s behalf, the postal service and to cripple the franchise for Democrats specifically this fall. 

All those challenging Trump this November can’t be afraid to say so. We are all witness to his failings, and potential victims of them. If Trump is re-elected, there is no trust we can place in the scientific soundness of a rushed government show-vaccine.

COVID-19 has terrorized the nation because of Trump’s genocidal negligence, which now is increasingly a pretext for manipulating the vote.