By March 13th, 2020 Covid had begun to rapidly spread across the United States, despite Trump’s earlier promise that the virus would be “contained” and was “no big deal.”
Back in February of that year, as it was hitting China hard, he’d told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that the disease was far more dangerous than the flu, while he repeatedly lied about it to the American people.
But that was just the beginning.
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Woodward on a Feb. 7 phone call. “You know, the touch — you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air. That’s how it’s passed. And so that's a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than your — you know, your — even your strenuous flus.”
A total of 1,645 people from 47 States had been infected with the virus that causes Covid by March 13th, the day Trump issued an emergency declaration that began the process of shutting down America.
And it’s the “why” that Trump intentionally pushed a half-million Americans to die unnecessarily where our media, and the Democrats, have missed the shocking and horrifying story of Trump’s and Kushner’s soulless cruelty.
Trump finally acknowledged the severity of the virus’ spread on March 13th, but April 7, 2020, just three weeks later, was the day everything changed in America. And hardly anybody remembers it.
Or knows why it happened.
That was the day that Jared Kushner decided that letting Black and Hispanic Americans in Blue states die of Covid — yes, intentionally using the force of law and social pressure to push Black and brown people into death’s jaws — could become what his team called “an effective political strategy” to blame Democratic governors for Covid and help Republicans restore the economy to win the 2020 election.
It was also the day Donald Trump signed off on Kushner’s evil plan.
The most under-reported story of the pandemic, the one that seems destined to be overlooked as histories are being written, is what Trump did when he learned that the Covid virus was largely killing Black and Hispanic people and mostly sparing whites.
The moment he came to that realization he completely altered the US response to the pandemic — breaking away from the lockdown and isolation strategy that every other country in the world was using — leading to the unnecessary death of, according to the British Medical Journal Lancet and multiple other studies, at least 500,000 Americans.
Deaths that he and his advisors believed (correctly) would be, outside of nursing home residents, disproportionately Black and Hispanic people.
March 2020 was the month when things went to hell here in the United States. On March 5th there were 129 known cases and only 11 deaths in the US: just 33 days later, hospitals were using refrigerated trucks as morgues and over 10,000 Americans were dead of Covid.
Fear ran through communities and stalked our homes. We were washing our groceries with bleach after picking them up at the store’s parking lot from people wearing masks, goggles, and gloves. We bought up all the air filters in the country. We worked from home when we could. We isolated ourselves from other people as much as was humanly possible.
Within those few weeks in March and early April, serious Covid outbreaks were showing up across the Northeast and Trump — who had two years earlier shut down both of the two federal pandemic task forces Obama had put into place after the Ebola scare — charged his son-in-law, nepo-baby slumlord Jared Kushner, with responding to the crisis.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 13th, and most of the country shut down during the following week.
The skies and highways fell silent, the Dow collapsed, and millions of Americans were laid off — but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.
Jared Kushner put together a task force of preppie 30-something white men he knew from college to coordinate getting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from Trump buddies and companies close to Republican members of Congress into hospitals.
They even had a plan for the Post Office to distribute 650 million masks — 5 to every American household — to slow the pandemic.
But then came April 7th, just one month later, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.
It was followed the day later with the all-caps headline across the top of the front page: BLACK AMERICANS BEAR THE BRUNT AS DEATHS CLIMB.
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It hit conservative media, Donald Trump, and Jared Kushner like a lightning bolt.
Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, the report found, were Black or Hispanic, not white people!
As The New York Times reported on April 7th:
“The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates…
“In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is.”
White supremacist Republicans responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”
Rush Limbaugh declared solemnly that afternoon:
“With the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.”
And here it was:
“The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder,” Limbaugh giddily intoned, “harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody: disproportionate representation!”
It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race or Covid: it was purely systemic racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth, and are also over-represented in low-paid public-facing service jobs where they would more easily catch Covid.
It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course Black people were going to die more frequently from coronavirus.
But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing April 7th front-page articles about that disparity — followed by it leading the news that night on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox “News” — echoed across the rightwing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.
Tucker Carlson, the only prime-time Fox host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the dangers of the virus, changed his tune the following day, as documented by Media Matters for America.
Now, Tucker said on April 8th:
“[W]e can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.”
“The rest,” of course, were white people. Those “vulnerable citizens” Tucker wanted to get “back to work” were disproportionately minorities. As a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus noted:
“Essential workers who needed to work in person, and their family members, were significantly more likely to contract the coronavirus early in the crisis. These essential workers disproportionately earned low wages and were more likely to be people of color.
“Black and Latina women were particularly ‘overrepresented as essential workers’ at greater risk of coronavirus infection ‘with Latina women making up 22% of women grocery store workers and Black women making up 27% of women home health aide workers’…”
On the other hand, salaried workers — overwhelmingly white — were telecommuting. For over a year I did my show from home, for example, as did all my peers at SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and in most media operations around the country. Everywhere that (mostly white) people could work from home, employers were making accommodations.
But Trump wanted the rest of the economy to recover from the election-year shutdown shock because he knew presidents running for reelection during economic bad times almost always lose.
He knew that if he wanted to win in 2020, that meant getting “essential” workers like transit drivers, store clerks, and people in slaughterhouses back to their jobs.
Particularly if they were Black or brown.
Brit Hume joined Tucker’s show and, using his gravitas as a “real news guy,” intoned, in response to the report that mostly Black and brown people were dying:
“The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.”
Left unsaid was the issue of for whom it was “not quite as dangerous,” but Limbaugh listeners and Fox “News” viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy.
Only 12,677 Americans were dead by that April day, but now that Trump and his rightwing media knew that most of the non-elderly dying people were and would be Black and Hispanic, priorities were suddenly very, very different.
Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about getting those Black and brown people back to work, even if it meant exposing them to a deadly disease.
On April 12th, just four days after the news that most deaths were Black and Hispanic people in Blue states, Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up and would announce a specific plan to do that “shortly.”
On April 13th, the ultra-rightwing, nearly-entirely-white-managed US Chamber of Commerce published a policy paper titled Implementing A National Return to Work Plan.
The next day, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery” program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield” businesses from Covid death and injury lawsuits.
Three days after that, Freedomworks and the House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that “[I]t’s time to re-open the economy.”
Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide” encouraging conservatives to show up “in person” at their state capitols and governor’s mansions, and, for signage, to “Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep [the signs looking] homemade.”
One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 19th in nearly-all-white New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with angry white people metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.
One that drew particularly high levels of media attention — complete with swastikas, confederate flags, and assault rifles — was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer.
This was around the time long-standing rightwing white supremacist networks began to awaken and coordinate with each other. They reached out to members of Congress and the Senate and found allies. Trump explicitly encouraged them to require low-wage essential workers to return to their jobs.
Suddenly things began to change as the federal government stopped trying to save lives and started promoting policies that would eventually kill — unnecessarily — a half-million Americans.
NBC News, when they’d gotten hold of April emails from within the White House, ran the headline:
“Trump Administration Scrapped Plan to Send Every American a Mask in April, Email Shows.”
When Rachel Maddow reported on meat-packing plants that were epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding white community: the sick and dying people were mostly Hispanic and Black.
He essentially said, “No big deal.”
The Republican meme was now well-established and was being repeated virtually daily on Fox “News” and rightwing talk radio. Working-age white people were far, far less likely to get sick, more likely to be asymptomatic, or — even if they were unlucky and got sick — most likely to survive a trip to the hospital.
Then came news that bigger outbreaks than we realized were now happening in meat packing plants, places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).
Trump’s response was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.
African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meat packing plants, the elderly of all races were dying in nursing homes.
But the death toll among working age affluent white people (who could telecommute and/or were less likely to be obese, have hypertension, or struggle with diabetes) was relatively low.
It took a lot of pressure off Trump and his Republicans. They could now politicize the virus, and, if they did it right, they could do so publicly with a “wink” to their white supremacist base.
And if they could get the economy back to cranking along within the next few months, they might be able to pull the 2020 election out of the bag.
As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:
“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”
It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Red states, not being coastal travel hubs and generally lightly populated, seemed to have been spared.
And there was an election coming in just a few months, and Trump was already scapegoating Blue state governors for the high death rates.
Just four weeks after Trump changed his policy to force “essential workers” back into their jobs, he went on Fox to argue that Blue states should not get federal assistance because they were mismanaging Covid. As NBC News reported, Trump said:
“It's not fair to the Republicans, because all the states that need help, they’re run by Democrats in every case. Florida is doing phenomenal. Texas is doing phenomenal. The Midwest is, you know, fantastic…”
He kept at it, for months, leading up to the election in November.
As ABC News reported on September 17, 2020, Trump gleefully pushed Kushner‘s “effective political strategy,” pointing out the low Covid death rates in Red states, adding:
“So we’re down in this [Red state] territory. And that’s despite the fact that the blue states have had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed.”
ABC News closed that article with a paragraph noting:
“[Y]esterday was the furthest the president has gone in politicizing the pandemic which has claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 Americans.”
As a result of Trump’s and Kushner‘s “effective political strategy,” by year’s end the United States was ranked 5th worst in the world in our response (behind Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Iran); we had about 20% of the world’s Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of the world’s population.
As the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine noted in December 2020:
“Approximately 97.9 out of every 100,000 African Americans have died from COVID-19, a mortality rate that is a third higher than that for Latinos (64.7 per 100,000), and more than double than that for whites (46.6 per 100,000)...”
The lasting legacy of Trump’s April 8th change in policy and his encouraging Covid skepticism to get people back to work is that today we’re the world’s worst in terms of death and sickness, period.
He’d thrown his unqualified slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner at something even a professional would’ve found the challenge of a lifetime.
And then manipulated it to intentionally expose Black and brown people to a deadly disease in the hopes it would help him win the upcoming 2020 election.
More people have died of Covid in America, as a percentage or in absolute terms, than any other developed country in the world.
Why? Because Trump and his Republican enablers and co-conspirators were just fine with getting the economy back on track to win an election over the bodies of dead Black and Hispanic people, particularly when they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors.
Former Attorney General Kennedy’s grandson Max Kennedy Jr, 26, was one of the administration’s volunteers, who blew the whistle to Congress on Kushner and Trump. As Jane Mayer wrote for The New Yorker:
“Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as ‘a marketing genius,’ because, Kennedy said they’d told him, ‘he [Trump] personally came up with the strategy of blaming the [Blue] states.’”
As that report released from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus reported in 2022:
“In the first half of 2020, African Americans and Latinos had death rates from coronavirus that far outweighed those of whites. While 62% of the population age 45-54 in 2020 was white, this population accounted for only 22% of coronavirus deaths in that age range. …
“Disparities were even more pronounced in some states such as Louisiana, where in April 2020, African Americans represented 70% of coronavirus deaths despite being only one third of the state’s population.”
And once Trump and Kushner put that death-based reelection strategy into place in April, it became politically impossible to back away from it, even as more and more Red state white people started to become infected.
As Trump told Dr. Deborah Birx in mid-April and she reported in her book Silent Invasion: The Untold Story…:
“‘We will never shut down the country again. Never.’ His pupils hardened into points of anger… I felt the blood drain from my face, and I shivered slightly.”
Trump’s change — from a policy of prevention to a policy of “herd immunity” once he realized on April 7, 2020 that healthy white people were largely immune from death by the coronavirus — put the US on-course to have the worst Covid death rate in the world.
That was the day everything changed because Trump and Kushner were willing to let Black and Hispanic people die on a gamble they could still put the economy back together fast enough to win the 2020 election.
Over a million Americans have died so far, more than any other nation in the world. Multiple studies show that up to 500,000 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if Trump had just promoted masks and lock-downs through the year before the vaccine was available (like most other countries did) and, since then, if he had condemned the anti-vax movement that emerged in the last months of his presidency.
But he didn’t do either. All because he believed the virus disproportionately killed Black and brown people and he was willing to let human beings die just to get the economy back in shape so he could win the election.
And sure enough, as Congress reported in December, 2022, a massive number of those deaths were — as a clear result of Trump’s policy — among Black and Hispanic people.
Share this story, so the obscene tale of Trump’s hateful, political, and racist death count doesn’t get lost down the nation’s and media’s memory-hole…
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