Trump probably could have done better. So could have every other world leader.
Some world leaders did better. But still suffered many deaths.
A Virus is not a political issue.
Hyperbole is not constructive.
AKA “Let’s all just forget about what a complete fuckup Trump was, and how his idiotic language, actions and inactions led to hundreds of thousands of dead Americans. It’s all behind us now. Let’s move on”
Why not just go with “mistakes were made”
Even just trying to take the crisis seriously, and not actively undermining medical experts and openly encouraging people to flout public-health protocols, would have been way better than what Trump actually did.
You can’t really compare this to the actions of most other world leaders (with the exception of a few like Brazil’s Bolsonaro, who also engaged in Trumpian-style irresponsible antics actively undermining the public-health response). Most other world leaders, although they made some mistakes and bad choices, were at least trying to figure out and implement effective ways to protect their citizenry.
Trump, on the other hand, was completely uninterested in any aspect of the pandemic other than its impact on his own “ratings”. It’s not that he just made a few well-intentioned mistakes: he enthusiastically embraced positions that were directly damaging to the public-health response to the pandemic, just because he thought it would make him look good to the people who believed him, like his dismissive attitude towards mask-wearing and his lies about COVID “just going away”.
Well, it shouldn’t have been, and Trump shouldn’t have made it one. But he thought (if Trump’s decision processes can actually be dignified with the term “thinking”) that politicizing actions such as taking this adversarial stance against public-health measures, threatening blue-state governors with limited access to PPE, etc., would make him look “powerful” and “in control”.
So Trump politicized the COVID response, and everybody in the country suffered because of that. Ironically, if Trump had managed to rise above his petty personal egotism to actually lead the nation in combating the virus in a non-politicized way, he would probably have easily won re-election.
Where between “mistakes were made” and “Trump is a mass murderer” would you land?
Nixon easily takes the prize. He is directly responsible for deaths in Vietnam and in the Cambodian Civil War and genocide both with sabotaging the Vietnamese peace process for his political goals and choosing policies that escalated violence in both Vietnam and Cambodia.
Not to mention the East Timor genocide.
Donald Trump is a horrible President. He is not however the worst mass killer.
Trump knew full well that his supporters would do ANYTHING he would tell them to do, and would think ANYTHING that he told them to think, and he could have implored them to mask up, hunker down and distance as much as possible as SOON as the virus hit our country - he could have framed it any damn way he wanted, he could have presented it as a patriotic duty, he could have spun it as taking a stand against China, he could have put it in terms of America showing the rest of the world that we could crack down harder and faster on the virus than any other country - there are a million things he and his surrogates could have done to encourage proactive safety measures against COVID. Instead, he and his administration dragged ass, dragged ass, dragged ass, and indeed blissfully SPREAD the virus in innumerable official functions. I have absolutely no problem putting the death toll on Trump.
I’m glad no Trump apologists were on the jury for Charles Manson’s trial.
Nobody is claiming that Trump ever personally, directly murdered anybody (although if it ever came out that he had, I wouldn’t find it very surprising). So your comparisons to DIY mass murderers like Samuel Little are beside the point.
The question is whether and to what extent Trump can be compared with other political figures who by their irresponsible and/or vicious actions caused massive numbers of deaths. If someone like Andrew Jackson can be called a “mass murderer” due to his genocidal “Indian Removal” campaigns—even though Jackson didn’t do any murdering by his own hand—then I don’t see why Trump shouldn’t be measured by the same yardstick.
It kind of is, when the US has a disproportionate rate on infection to the rest of the free world who were NOT listening to a traitorous, self-serving liar.
Long story short, the US has 5% of world population but 25% of the COVID 19 infections. THAT is due to policy, or rather, Trump’s lack of.
“Donald Trump is Americas worst mass murderer” Is hyperbole.
Fine he was a horrible President.
He was not America’s worst mass murderer
Do you mean Indonesia, when the US helped them massacre hundreds of thousands? That happened during LBJ’s reign. Or did Nixon meddle in Indonesia prior?
I think it’s closer to a million but as someone said, SE Asia dwarfs that unfortunately.
We get your point that Donald Trump didn’t personally murder people by his own hand in the way that killers such as Samuel Little or Harold Shipman did, and that’s why Trump doesn’t appear on internet lists of mass murderers. Agreed.
Do you get the point about comparing Donald Trump’s actions to those of other Presidents such as Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon, and calling them “mass murderers” in the sense of recklessly or deliberately causing many deaths by their brutal policies?
I guess what I mostly mean to say is, do you understand that the term “mass murderer” is being used here in a different sense from how you’re interpreting it?
Do you understand that terms like mass murderer should not be lightly used?
Do you understand that Trump’s specific actions probably caused north of 100 thousand American deaths? Like, if anyone else were doing the job, without Trump’s specific actions, those deaths wouldn’t have happened.
Do you not accept that?
He made poor decisions. He is responsible for those decisions.
He is is not America’s worst mass murderer.
I had just heard the Kissinger was involved in it - I might have had bad info.
Whichever president/presidents allowed that to happen/continue fuck them too.
Do you think that applying the term “mass murderer” to Presidential policies that deliberately or recklessly cause at least tens of thousands of deaths is using the term lightly?
Because if so, I definitely don’t agree with you about that.
Your main issue seems to be, both here and in the “coup attempt” thread, that you’ve come up with your own preferred definition of a certain term, and you’re just not going to accept that anybody else is allowed to use a different definition of it. Or that there can be two different definitions of the same term that are both valid in different contexts.
If you are going to roam the internet trying to stamp out all uses of the term “mass murderer” meaning politicians whose policies killed thousands or millions of people—as opposed to individual criminals who personally murdered a couple-few dozen other individuals—you’re really going to have your work cut out for you:
“If one accepts the genocide argument, this makes Nixon the worst mass murderer in US history.”
“The Mass Murderer on Your $20” [Andrew Jackson]
Ok then. Mass murderer means poor public policy.
I don’t agree with that. But oh well.