March 27, 2020: Donald Trump, having put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of America's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, says that he instructed Pence not to reach out to Governors who aren't "appreciative" of his Administration's efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus in their States.
He mentioned Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, both Democrats who had been critical of the White House's actions to combat the deadly pandemic.
Trump said that Pence "calls all the Governors. And I tell him, I'm a different type of person, and I say, 'Mike, don't call the Governor of Washington. You're wasting your time with him.'"
It should be noted that Inslee had run to be one of Trump's 2020 opponents, but his Presidential campaign never made it out of 2019. Whitmer, however, did not run against Trump.
So, basically, Trump was operating like an old-time big-city "political machine" Mayor: Only picking up the garbage, plowing the streets, and fixing the potholes in the neighborhoods that voted for him. He was denying funding to Governors of Blue States.
States likely to have more minorities than Red States.
In other words, Trump was deciding who was going to get proper care, based on race.
In other words, Donald Trump was committing an act of genocide.
I doubt that any of the previous 44 Presidents -- or 43, since Grover Cleveland had nonconsecutive terms, and thus gets counted twice -- would have denied aid to Governors who "weren't nice to him."
Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover had thin views of a President's constitutional power. Lyndon Johnson had a similar need for ego-stroking. And Richard Nixon could be as petty as hell. But even they would have chosen to overcome those issues, and tried to save as many lives as they could. If they failed, so be it: At least they would have tried. They could be accused of trying the wrong thing, but not of an unwillingness to try something.
Trump? He did not do his best and see it fail. He made a conscious choice. He turned Franklin Roosevelt's reassuring words upside-down: "The only thing you have to fear is me!"
It was all a part of the method to his madness: Deny that the problem existed, because admitting it would make him look weak, something he was desperate to avoid at all times, but especially at this point, when he was running for re-election; then, help his own people, and only his own people, to lead to victory.
Either he was too dishonest to be President, or too incompetent to be President. Of course, it could be that he was both. But look at these statements, gathered by Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat who has represented a District based on Austin, Texas since 1995:
January 22, 2020: "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. It's going to be just fine."
February 2: "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China."
February 10: "Looks like, by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away."
February 25: "I think that's a problem that's going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we're very close to a vaccine." (The 1st vaccine available to the public was made so on December 11. That was 290 days later. That was not "very close.")
February 27: "It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear."
March 4: "If we have thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work -- some of them go to work, but they get better."
March 5: "I never said people that are feeling sick should go to work."
March 6: "You have to be calm. It'll go away."
March 10: "Just stay calm. It will go away."
March 12, "The Day Everything Stopped": "You know, you see what's going on. And so, I just wanted that to stop as it pertains to the United States. And that's what we've done. We've stopped it."
March 13: "No, I don't take responsibility at all."
March 14, asked to rate his response on a scale of zero to ten, apparently taking responsibility for this gross misperception: "I'd rate it a ten."
March 24: "I'm also hopeful to have Americans working again by that Easter, that beautiful Easter day." (Never mind that Easter is a Sunday and a holiday, and most Americans wouldn't have been working.)
March 24, talking about the Governors and Mayors who needed more hospital beds and more tests: "They have to treat us well, also. They can't say, 'Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.'"
March 26: "We've had a big problem with the young, a woman Governor from, you know who I'm talking about, from Michigan." (At the time, Whitmer was 48 years old.)
March 27: "I love Michigan, one of the reasons we are doing such a great job for them during this horrible pandemic. Yet your Governor, Gretchen 'Half' Whitmer, is way in over her head, she doesn't have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude!"
March 27: "We're doing a great job for the State of Washington, and I think the Governor...he's constantly chirping and I guess complaining, would be a nice way of saying it."
March 30: "Stay calm, it will go away. You know it -- you know it is going away, and it will go away, and we're going to have a great victory."
March 30, keeping in mind that the State of New York also had a Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo: "I think New York should be fine, based on the numbers that we see, they should have more than enough. I mean, I'm hearing stories that they're not used, or they're not used right." (Whenever Trump says things like "I'm hearing," or "People are saying," that means he is making it up.)
April 1, about Governors who were pleading for medical gear and ventilators to treat surging coronavirus hospitalizations: "They have to treat us well, also. They can't say, 'Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.'"
April 6: The U.S. death toll passed 10,000, nearly all of those within the previous month.
April 9, when asked if his coronavirus response could have been better: "I couldn't have done it any better." That statement was almost certainly the truth: Almost any other President could have done it better, but he couldn't have. This is why Trump lies, about everything, about big things and small things alike: Because the truth hurts him.
April 11: The U.S. death toll passed 20,000. That's doubling the number of deaths in just 5 days.
Trump did one, and only one, smart thing in regard to COVID: He never let the media show the dead bodies. That was the lesson he learned from the Vietnam War: If people never see the bodies or the coffins on TV, they won't get angry, demonstrate in the streets, and demand a different President.
So, unless you knew someone who died from it, the death of 250,000 Americans before Election Day -- a quarter of a million -- wasn't real, only the annoying restrictions were. The Democrats were for the restrictions.
March 27, 2020 would have been my father's birthday. He had Bacehlor's and Master's of Science degrees from what's now known as the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. On the one hand, he would have appreciated that, in March 2020, Americans were talking about science and not sports. On the other hand, he would have hated the reason why. "You ninny!" would have been the least of his utterances at Trump.
UPDATE: As of April 26, 2023, 1,130,662 Americans had died from COVID. The Brookings Institution estimated that 784,672 of those people -- about 69 percent -- died as a result of Trump's inaction.
Seven hundred eighty-four thousand, six hundred seventy-two people:
* That's 20 percent more Americans as died in the Civil War, North and South combined.
* Half again as many Americans as died in World War I and World War II combined.
* 13 times as many as died in the entire Vietnam War.
* 98 1900 Galveston Hurricanes.
* 174 Iraq Wars.
* 261 9/11s.
* 327 Pearl Harbors.
* 355 Johnstown Floods of 1889.
* 522 Titanics.
* 563 Hurricane Katrinas.
* 655 Lusitanias.
* 854 Jonestown Massacres.
* 1,595 Cocoanut Grove Fires of 1942.
* 2,615 Great Chicago Fires of 1871.
* 3,089 Hurricane Sandys.
* 4,671 Oklahoma City bombings.
* 5,374 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fires of 1911.
* 8,437 Malbone Street Wrecks of 1918.
* 30,183 Sandy Hook Massacres.
* And 196,190 Benghazis.
All because Trump not only refused to give the aid that was needed, where it was needed, but also refused to use the pandemic plan left for him by President Black Man.
The blood of 784,672 Americans is on Donald Trump's hands -- and that's only counting COVID, not including everything else he's done.
As of March 27, 2026, the CDC estimated that 1,231,440 Americans had died from the disease.
*
March 27, 2020 was a Friday. COVID had already forced everything to be shut down. There were no scores on this day.
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