President Donald Trump’s favorite senator is apparently okay with 40,000 more Americans dying from coronavirus.
So far, more than 87,000 Americans have died and upwards of 1.4 million are infected as a result of Trump’s reckless and incompetent response to the pandemic. After having originally downplayed the virus as just 15 cases in the United States that he claimed would quickly become zero cases, the infection rate has only soared, along with the death toll.
Despite those alarming numbers, Trump and Republicans continue to push for reopening the country earlier than health experts recommend, thus causing further breakouts of the virus that are hitting red states particularly hard and sparking fears of a second wave.
With the election just months away, Republicans fear the devastation will sweep them out of power in the Senate and boot Trump from the White House. That’s why Trump and his supporters are so desperate to declare victory over the pandemic even though it is still raging and killing Americans.
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
To that end, Trump is even trying to force the CDC to revise the death toll numbers downward because they look so bad for him.
The death toll is expected to blow past 100,000 this summer, likely as early as June and probably sooner than that.
So the question, really, is what number would the Trump administration consider a win? Because Trump has moved the goalposts repeatedly in an effort to make his response seem adequate even though it’s not even close. And some Trump officials don’t even want to talk about the death toll. One even refused to talk about body counts because they are “gross.”
According to Politico:
By far the most sensitive subject is the awful reality of the growing death count. ‘I’m not going to play that game,’ said one White House official when asked if there is a number of dead Americans beyond what the public would tolerate. ‘I think all these body count things are somewhat gross and the definitions are kind of fu–ed up and they’re not uniform across states and across countries.'”
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), however, had no problem throwing out a number as his metric of success.
“The closer you can have it to 120 [thousand deaths], I think you can say you limited the casualties in this war,” Graham said.
Seriously? The fact is that the death toll is already unacceptable. Had Trump acted sooner instead of pretending the problem didn’t exist, our country would have gone into lockdown and initiated social distancing sooner to save lives. The death toll would be significantly lower. But it’s not, and it’s only going to get higher because many states are disregarding the clear danger of the virus to reopen early to please Trump.
The death toll is going to blow past 120,000. Then what? Move the goalposts to 150,000? 200,000?
The idea that 120,000 American deaths should be praised as some kind of victory is sickening, and Graham should be ashamed of himself, especially since many of those deaths will be his own constituents. Clearly, South Carolina needs a new senator.
Featured image via screen capture
Like what you see here? Join the discussion on Facebook over at Americans For Sanity!
