Prologue 1: First Tier of Corruption

“Trumpism: Why Traditional Republicans Should Withdraw Support” © Tom Ersin 2022. This is the current installment from the serialized publication of this distinctive historical book.

Prologue 1: First Tier of Corruption

1) Insurrection

President Trump incited a literal insurrection after his reelection loss in an attempt to retain power unconstitutionally. Many have called it (literally) an attempted coup. Seven people died and hundreds were injured (including 140 police officers) as a result of approximately 800 Trump supporters — mostly white supremacists, white nationalists, and sympathizers — breaching, ransacking, and terrorizing the Capitol building for several hours attempting to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden as president.

How was Donald able to foment the violent insurrection? With cult-leaderlike fallacious passion, precision, and consistency he’s convinced his followers that the 2020 election was stolen from him — from “you” — through enormous (nonexistent) voting fraud. Remember the last component of his 2016 election win: willingness to lie and shock with abandon. He’s sold fraud to his followers with zero legitimate evidence. He’s made the sale in the face of the most contested, most law-suited, most secure election in history. He lost every contested point, every law suit, every recount and audit — every Supreme Court decision.

Still, Trump supporters believe.

2) Russian Asset

Consider President Trump’s inscrutable advocacy for Vladimir Putin, head autocrat of one of America’s most dangerous adversaries and perpetrator of cyberwarfare election interference that likely put Donald in the White House. Mr. Trump always defended the Russian leader and supported Putin’s pet policies: 1) consistently mirrored Russian propaganda points; 2) compared Russia’s authoritarian tactics (such as murdering journalists and dissidents) to America, saying the U.S. is just as bad; 3) slashed the U.S. State Department’s budget and purged its Russia experts; 4) allowed the GOP platform to be changed to favor Russia; 5) supported Brexit and weakening the EU; 6) undermined Germany; 7) supported Russia’s readmission to the G7(8) intergovernmental forum (from which it was thrown out after invading Ukraine and annexing its Crimean Peninsula); 8) withdrew U.S. troops from Syria; 9) defended Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan; 10) promoted far-fetched, pro-Russia foreign policy canards (e.g., Poland is preparing to invade Belarus, Montenegro is a threat to its neighbors); 11) bashed and threatened to withdraw from NATO; 12) stopped U.S.-South Korea annual joint military exercises; 13) lifted Russian sanctions; 14) publicly negated Russia’s interference in our elections (accepted Putin’s denials); and 15) obstructed the special counsel investigation, to cover up Russia’s involvement in U.S. election interference.

“[Vladimir Putin] knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the [U.S.] president.”

(Clapper, James, former [Obama] national intelligence director; CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper; 12/18/2017.)

“Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to U.S. national security. He is refusing to protect vital U.S. interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of [Russian President] Putin.”

(McCaffrey, Barry, retired four-star U.S. Army general, national military and foreign policy expert; Twitter post; 3/16/2018.)

“There is no [public] evidence that Mr. Putin is dictating American policy. But it’s hard to imagine how he could do much better, even if he were.”

(Rice, Susan E., former [Obama] national security adviser; “How Trump Helps Putin”; The New York Times; 6/8/2018.)

Still, Trump supporters believe.

3) Psychological Torture of Migrant Children

In 2017 and 2018, Donald Trump instituted a policy that separated 5,400 migrant minors — including babies, toddlers, and other young children — from their parents or other family-member guardians for months. Caged in subhuman conditions, 7-year-olds crying, sobbing for their mothers and fathers, this treatment caused lifelong-lasting psychic damage. The non-profit Physicians for Human Rights determined this trauma to be torture.

Hundreds of these children have been separated permanently through government incompetence — immigration authorities failed to track their or their families’ whereabouts. Mr. Trump continued to push this brutal, inhumane practice while illegal immigration was at its lowest levels in decades. He stopped it only after prompting national moral outrage, including from many supporters.

The adults who brought these children across the southern border might have broken laws, though many were legal asylum seekers. (In any event, the vast majority simply were desperate to save their families.) But the kids are innocent human beings, lambs of God, put through the horror — the torture — of losing their parents in a strange country, not knowing if they would ever see them again, so the president could “set an example.”

4) COVID-19

But even more noxious and deadly than migrant child torture, Russian collusion, and an insurrection was Donald’s corrupt and tragic handling of the worst pandemic in 100 years. He intentionally played down the coronavirus danger from the beginning, disparaged the CDC and FDA and their scientists, belittled prevention efforts and guidelines, impeded testing, stymied supply production and distribution, and told the country “the virus will just disappear,” all because he feared any attention to the problem would hurt “his” economy and therefore endanger his reelection. Mr. Trump did all this because he knew a reelection defeat would mean loss of presidential immunity and almost certain indictment — and possible (likely?) prison time — for any one of a half-dozen criminal investigations awaiting consummation.

On Feb. 6, 2020, the first U.S. COVID-19 death occurred in Northern California.

By Feb. 21, 2021, there were 500,000 American pandemic deaths.

[FACT:] The United States comprises 4.2% of Earth’s population while accounting for 20% of world pandemic deaths (almost 5 times the per capita average).

[ESTIMATE:] A conservative aggregate expert estimate puts Trump malfeasance deaths at 250,000 (half the total).

(as conservatively extrapolated from COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University; 2/21/2021.)

Columbia University

“If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March [15], about 36,000 [approximately 50%] fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers. And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83% — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated. Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May.”

(Glanz, James & Robertson, Campbell; “Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show”; The New York Times; 5/20/2020.)

University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

In September 2020, global health policy expert Dr. Vin Gupta declared that 70% of pandemic deaths could have been avoided had Trump acted sooner, and 200,000 lives could be saved in the future if he acted “now.” Unfortunately the president continued downplaying the pandemic and resisting prevention efforts.

(Gupta, Vin, MD, MPA, MSc, University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation professor, global health policy expert, formerly with WHO, CDC; “Dr. Vin Gupta: ‘Evidence That 70% of Lives Could Have Been Saved’”; MSNBC’s Meet the Press Daily with Chuck Todd; 9/18/2020.)

The New England Journal of Medicine

The New England Journal of Medicine for the first time in its 208-year history weighed in on a presidential election, calling for the current administration to be removed from power. This sentiment was unanimous among its 35 editors:

“This crisis has produced a test of leadership. … Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy. The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. … [They’ve] failed at almost every step. We had ample warning. …

“The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. …

“[T]ruth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

(editors; “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum”; The New England Journal of Medicine; 10/8/2020.)

National Center for Disease Preparedness, Earth Institute, Columbia University

“This [October 2020] report looks at the staggering and disproportionate nature of COVID-19 fatalities in the United States, which now ranks first in the world in the total number of fatalities, to estimate how many deaths were ‘avoidable.’ With more than 217,000 lives lost, and a proportional mortality rate twice that of neighboring Canada and more than fifty times that of Japan — a country with a much older population than the U.S. — the United States has turned a global crisis into a devastating tragedy.

“Through  comparative  analysis  and  applying  proportional  mortality  rates,  we  estimate  that  at  least 130,000 deaths and perhaps as many as 210,000 could have been avoided with earlier policy interventions and more robust federal coordination and leadership. Even with the dramatic recent appearance of new COVID-19 waves globally, the abject failures of U.S. government policies and crisis messaging persist.”

(Redlener, Irwin, MD & Sachs, Jeffrey D., Ph.D. & Hansen, Sean, MPA & Hupert, Nathaniel, MD, MPH; “130,000-210,000 Avoidable COVID-19 Deaths – and Counting – in the U.S.”; National Center for Disease Preparedness, Earth Institute, Columbia University; 10/21/2020.)

White House Coronavirus Task Force

“I look at it this way. The first time we have an excuse. There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original [coronavirus pandemic] surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially. … The federal government did not provide consistent messaging to the American people and that is fault number one.”

(Birx, Deborah, MD, former top [Trump] White House Coronavirus Task Force adviser; COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out [CNN documentary]; 3/28/2021.)

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[Tom Ersin has been a full-time professional writer and editor since 2010 and holds degrees in communications and counseling. He’s a long-time political observer and has written a half-dozen nonfiction books on 21st century U.S. politics.] Click here to purchase book. Please leave a rating.