The One Million Reasons We Cannot Afford to Bring Donald Trump Back

His dereliction of duty should be caveat enough.

The One Million Reasons We Cannot Afford to Bring Donald Trump Back
AI/Stable Diffusion

It was kind of cold that day in March 2021 when I was walking around New York. There was a palpable absence of people. The few that were out had masks on and were fearful. They did not smile. It seemed more like the aftermath of a chemical attack.

But we were in the midst of a global crisis that had started a year prior. At this point there was nobody that did not know someone who had not been afflicted with it if they hadn’t themselves. Quite a few knew at least one person who had died as a result.

By afternoon I had made it to Brooklyn Hospital Center and saw something I thought I’d never see: the street lined with refrigerated trucks. I didn’t know what it was at first, but I looked toward the entrance of the facility and I saw a hospital staffer hunched over in tears.

These trucks held hundreds of the dead, all succumbed to 2019-nCOV, which we came to know colloquially as COVID.

This had come because the disease had entered the United States and spread, likely through entry points like airports and from carriers who had unwittingly given it to others who had not built up an immunity and for whom there was no vaccine available at the time.

It was going to get a lot worse. In fact, it got so bad that 1 million people in the United States alone would lose their lives.

There was no other way to look at this other than as the gross negligence of a man who deliberately ignored a crisis like Nero fiddling while Rome burned to the ground.

It is for this reason I’m making it blunt: if you place Donald Trump back in the White House, he could potentially do even worse damage.

Laughing at Our Pain

Just a week out from Election Day 2024, people seem to have a long list of why they wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump, for some a longer list of why they would vote for Kamala Harris. The constant lying and exaggeration; aligning himself with racists and extremists; his denial of the global climate crisis; his usurping of tax benefits for working people; allegations of sexual assault; multiple criminal charges for which he has already been convicted; his false claim of foreign policy dominance over other countries; blocking aid to hurricane stricken Puerto Rico, his stacking of the Supreme Court with conservative judges; his backing of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and cheering of the end ofaffirmative action in college education, and most prescient with many people, inciting an attempt to overthrow the government. 

But for me it all starts not with all of the things he did, but the one thing he didn’t do, which was his job as defined in the U.S. Constitution: protect the American people.

If you don’t remember, I’ll make it clear for you. While multiple national and global health organizations warned of the spread of COVID, Trump called it the “China virus” and “Kung Flu” in an attempt to ridicule it as a Democratic ‘hoax” until he could no longer make that claim. Among the many stupid things he said about the debacle, he also suggested treating the disease with bleach.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic and urged governments around the globe to take the necessary precautions. Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction.” He warned days later: "We are at war with a virus that threatens to tear us apart."

A Sloppy Response

Trump’s flippant early attitude toward COVID all but ignored an existing plan left for him by then-President Barack Obama in 2016 as he exited the White House. Despite Republican denials that the Obama Administration left any preparations, a 69-page National Security Council  playbook had already been released giving instructions on coordinating in the event of an infectious disease event anywhere in the world. Obama wanted to avoid the mistakes made when the Ebola virus made its way stateside in 2015.

It is highly unlikely that Trump didn’t get the memo because according to Politico, his administration did brief it in 2017 not long after he took office. New White House officials said it hadn’t been vetted by the NSC and that they had a plan of their own. Whatever that plan was, Trump didn’t know about it because he claimed that ‘nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion.”

On May 15, 2020, by which 84,000 Americans were dead, Trump announced “Operation Warp Speed,” a public-private partnership designed to accelerate the development of a vaccine to coronavirus. It was transitioned when President Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021, when he began the White House COVID-19 Response Team. In August of that year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of the first COVID vaccine.

I don’t need to remind you of the hell we experienced as the pandemic shut our society down for years until the vaccine quelled its spread. But I will remind you because of Trump’s ignorance, 1.2 million people are now dead.

TL:DR

In short, Trump first made fun of a serious global health crisis until he couldn’t; claimed there was no plan in place when there was; and launched his own plan which came too late to save many thousands of lives.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican supporters literally fought in every corner they could to get rid of mask mandates that could prevent the spread of the virus. It was as if the right wing wanted the virus to spread, or they were too dumb to understand simple germ theory, which most people learn in high school.

At the end of the day, Donald Trump was at best derelict in his duty to ensure coronavirus did not impact America the way it did. A macro view of it would be that he was criminally negligent.

When you are choosing to hire a job candidate, how likely are you to approve of someone whose incompetence caused death in his last role? Should the captain of the Exxon Valdez in 1989 get a job on a Carnival Cruise? Would you trust the marketers behind New Coke to sell cars for you?

It Is Up To You

The global stage is much more complicated than it was just four years ago. The Middle East already has one foot off the cliff overlooking an unfathomable conflict that could last decades; there’s no sign of the war in Ukraine coming to an end anytime soon; and we’re facing the possibility of a similar war between China and Taiwan.

Plus, we’re still facing the Climate Crisis, the world’s worst problem. I cannot underscore enough how much trouble we’re in with that one.

Electing a man who has shown that he is incapable of a proper response to a catastrophe that has the potential to cost millions of lives, aside from all the other reasons, could have incalculable, irreparable results.

It is for this reason that American voters possibly hold the fate of the world for the next few generations in their hands. Putting Donald Trump back in power is likely to usher us into a new era of domestic and global chaos that we will not see the end of in our lifetimes.

There’s no guarantees on what will happen if we elect Kamala Harris to the Oval Office to succeed Biden. She’s never been president and everything under her will be new. It all remains to be seen. But we’ve been shown what Trump will do. He’s already made his statement with his actions.

And if he says who he is the first time, believe him.


Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.