By Archie Adrian

Keep in mind: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” That is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda for the German Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. Trump embodies that propaganda. He needs to destroy and blame others for him to survive the chaos he causes; and he thrived his entire adult life with his destroy, deny, deflect philosophy. The following will explain how his philosophy and related actions caused 83% of the US Covid-19 related incidences and deaths. And because they were avoidable, they are due to Trump creating his own virus, The “Trump Virus.”

Going back just a little, as of July 27, 2020, Donald J. Trump was responsible for 121,247 US deaths due to his hatefulness and incompetence resulting in the failure to stop or drastically curtail the Covid-19 pandemic in this country. Did this inept and irresponsible president kill these people with his own hands? No; of course not. Could he have prevented these deaths? “Abso – firkin – lutely.” The numbers grow as I’m writing this. As of August 19, 2020, Trump, was answerable for 141,234 avoidable deaths. By August 26, 2020, the number of the “Trump Virus” deaths grew to 145,925. And that’s gracious. Epidemiologists and other scientists estimated that 90% of U.S. deaths could have been prevented with early interventions. Their calculations increase Trump’s responsibility for Covid-19 deaths, as of August 26, 2020, to about 160,882. How did Trump create the “Trump Virus” and how is he responsible for those deaths? I’ll tell ‘ya.

It’s “waay” past time to hold this destructive narcissist, who sits in the oval office, or his golf cart, responsible for his terrible lack of effective, moral, courageous leadership; you know, the “proper” standard that is expected of an American president. I am fed up with Trump, the closest thing to a real traitor, saying and doing things that are dangerous to our national security and lives through provoking  violence, telling lies, fostering bigotry, endangering our country, and stoking fear – yet, not be held accountable.

We are a very divided country on this mid-2020 day. We were, albeit slowly, evolving toward “A more Perfect Union”- very slowly. Now, we have an entity occupying the white house who should never have been allowed to be president. Somehow, with the confluence of several factors, he is filling the chair in the oval office. On August 21, 2020, in one of his rabid campaign speeches or interviews he railed something like "I'm the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness, and chaos."  If you let the democrats win, there will be mass riots, anarchy… pestilence, cannibals will eat your children, dogs will mate with cats, the sky will rain sharks. Ok; I made up the part after the ellipsis. Nevertheless, he did spout the absurd and bizarre preceding comments quoted. 

Trump does not have one scintilla of compassion for any human being other than for his corrupt, self-absorbed self. As a comparison, most any of the other 2016 presidential candidates, republican or democrat, would have been more ethical and self-controlled than this proven swindler. Worse yet, he behaves like a parasite Basically, he thrives, and causes hurt and ultimately the demise of others. You have seen it; it’s all video documented.

We know he is corrupt. That’s already been proven. He also demonstrates his stupidity and dishonest nature, daily. It is no surprise that one of his professors said, “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” (late Wharton professor William T. Kelley)

Globally, it has already been proven that most developed countries successfully controlled the Covid-19 pandemic and substantially lessened the number of cases and deaths. They accomplished this with rigorous adherence to just a few important nation-wide actions implemented by elected leaders. “Over the past month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus. That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html)

Nevertheless, Trump is deliberately misrepresenting the extreme number of cases and deaths in the US and some equally corrupt and/or incompetent governors are still choosing to follow “the useful idiot” to the injury and death of loved ones, their constituents, and possibly to their own political demise. Every one of those congress people and governors should, ignominiously, be thrown out of office.

I worked in healthcare, contributing to managing hospitals for over 20 years. I think I know a fair amount about what constitutes an “actual” healthcare delivery system, rather than the fragmented, non-system delivery of illness care that we have in America. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development calculated that the United States per capita healthcare spending is nearly three times the average of other developed countries (https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0006_health-care-oecd) yet with the money spent on healthcare, we still have not controlled the Covid-19 virus. And with Trump and his complicit republican colleagues, we still have millions of people without healthcare insurance, and the number grows with each republican supported destructive effort.

Trump, with the silent approval of the republicans, has lied about the Covid-19 issue and the healthcare system needs, has little intellectual ability to understand the true complexity of the current pandemic and necessary actions to ameliorate its damage. He thinks he can continue his “Capt. Chaos” strategy of destroy, deny, deflect. After all, that is how he has stayed out of jail his entire life, even while frequently breaking laws for over 50-years. That is what he is doing, during his fanciful term in office – I shudder when I remind myself that by suppressing the votes, lying, and with Russia’s successful interference in the 2016 election, he was elected by the Electoral College. And they are at it again.

He and his disciples dishonestly declare that they are doing everything humanly possible to protect the American population from the Covid-19 virus. How stupid do we have to be to accept that he still refuses to utilize the Defense Production Act for this real life and death crisis and mandate that many university and commercial laboratories, and private production companies produce, collect, evaluate, and provide rapid Covid-19 tests so results are received within 24 hours, start to finish; so all frontline healthcare workers have the most efficacious protective gear and coverings, not the inadequate protective gear they are forced to use because there is a dearth of the needed high-quality protective gear. They need to be kept safe, so they won’t contract Covid-19 while they are trying to prevent, protect, and cure Covid-19 infected people, and still responsibly managing care of other illnesses.

Also needing to be optimally protected are the additional essential frontline workers, who are being treated as disposable and given minimal protection. They are staffing all the necessary environments providing groceries, police and fire protection, education, home delivery services, postal services, and other retail products and societal services. Yet, we have provided them with either no protective gear or less than optimal protective gear. So, what is the Destroyer-in-chief’s simplistic, stupid, and dishonest spin? He says it’s a hoax, an effort to undermine his presidency, it’s part of the deep state. He won’t implement the Defense Production Act because he wants the companies to have freedom of choice to do what they think is best. All while a staggering, number of American citizens are unnecessary dying daily, despite all of America’s wealth and technological capabilities. 

Well, since the stone age, since the “Fred Flintstone” era, businesses focus on their primary job of generating maximum financial returns, increasing the value of their executives’ personal stock and that of their major stockholders. Making millions and billions of dollars is what they think is best – for them. What a surprise. “Oh, there is a crisis of national and global proportions? Wow! That’s terrible. I hope you can fix it. It is not my problem.” They will not change and rapidly produce the products critically needed to bring the Covid-19 crisis under control, unless mandated by the FEDERAL government. Test my assertions: Have you seen many manufacturing companies produce the Covid-19 necessary products in amazingly large numbers that are necessary? No, of course not.

Let’s have a peaceful, digital, national protest consisting of a petition that includes all essential workers, as described above. They are asked to express their informed opinions on whether they have the optimal gear necessary to keep them safe from the consequences of contracting Covid-19. I predict that the majority of them will respond with a resounding “No;” they are unsafe and do not have the high quality equipment, testing, protective coverings, in the large volumes that were needed months ago, today, in the immediate future.

“Donnie, Donnie, Donnie,” this is in your wheelhouse – it is in your job description, your responsibility, your sworn oath, that you are ignoring. It is your specialty to spend other people’s money. You brag about that. So, do that – legitimately and responsibly this time. You inherited a sound and growing economy, even though you keep lying about it. “Obama’s Last Three Years Of Job Growth All Beat Trump’s Best Year.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2020/02/07/ obamas-last-three-years-of-job-growth-all-beat-trumps-best-year/#45fa8d546ba6)

You only faced one crisis, that you did not provoke, Covid-19, in your almost 4 years in office and you f***** that up. One of your gambits is to use the “case fatality ratio,” to lessen the evidence of the miserable job you are doing. Several variables, including under-testing and under-diagnosing actual cases, contribute to that ratio being inaccurate. Conversely, it is more difficult to distort the “number of deaths per 100,000 population” or deaths as a percentage of the population. As I think it is much easier for citizens to understand more easily “cases or deaths as a percentage of the population,” following comparisons will use those percentages. “As of May 11, the U.S. had 24.66 deaths per 100,000 people… the 11th highest rate out of the more than 140 countries tracked by Johns Hopkins University.” (https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/ where-the-u-s-ranks-in-covid-19-deaths-per-capita/)

Let’s try to clearly and simply explain the global comparisons for the US infection rate, using data that the population can easily find and calculate. This makes it harder for various entities to distort the conclusions as just an effort to make Trump look bad. He’s doing that all by himself. America comprises about 4% of the world’s population. We represent about 22% of the global cases of Covid-19 cases. The “stable genius,” (Trump), says stupid things like “…the more we test the worse we look; we have more cases because we test more.” Trump’s math logic demonstrates that he Is as “God Damn” stupid as his Wharton professor lamented. What is an overly simplistic example that parallels his logic? “Hmmm.” How about this – we are tasked with painting an old historic building that will rot and crumble if it is not immediately protected by being painted. So, we paint a couple of walls and quit. When asked about the entire job, our response is “if we look at additional walls, we will have more painting to do. If we do not look for additional walls that need painting, we are in terrific shape; problem solved.”

What is relevant in managing efforts to minimize the Covid-19 spread and lethal consequences, is if we were doing such an outstanding job in all categories, our comparative global numbers, would be stellar. We should be doing much better or at least as good as the average country when compared to the rest of the planet, right? Of course, that’s correct. 

“We never had anything like the ‘China virus’. I closed the country up quickly and strongly. If I hadn’t done that, millions more people would have died” (Trump). “About 430,000 people have flown on direct flights from China to the United States since Chinese officials first disclosed the outbreak of what is now the novel coronavirus to world health officials on New Year’s Eve,” January 1, 2019. (https://www.foxnews.com/us/coronavirus-china-us-flights-430000-people). “Even after the order went into effect on February 2, some 40,000 people – traveling on 279 flights – have arrived in the U.S. from China,” according the New York Times’ analysis, based on data collected in both countries. In spite of Trump allowing over 6 million US citizens to become infected and over 183,000 to die (Johns Hopkins, August 31, 2020) by his dereliction of duty, he repeatedly says “China should have caught the outbreak and solved it. It would be so easy to stop it.” (Trump)

Ok; let’s agree that the original outbreak was due to this virus entering from China directly and indirectly through Europe as the research demonstrates. The most factual estimate is it began in an open-air food market environment; it was not a product of a Chinese laboratory as proffered by conspiracy purveyors. Yes, China could have done much better at quickly informing the world about its existence and danger. But we already had experience with China not revealing critical health information, from a previous outbreak. Our presidential leadership, with all the national resources available to it, should have been prepared for less than honest information from them. Instead, Trump praised China as being very transparent with the virus. Later, Trump and his campaign tried to blame congressional leaders and some governors for initially underestimating the severity of this virus. We became aware of this outbreak and had our first case on January 20, 2020. So, if it was “so easy…” to stop the virus, how did Trump let it explode to close to 5.8 million cases by August 26, 2020? “South Korea and the United States both recorded their first cases Jan. 20, 2020 yet South Korea has held its outbreak level to 30 cases per 100,000 people, compared with the U.S. figure of 1,655 per 100,000.” (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/08/20/ us-covid-19-response-how-miscommunication-selfishness-played-role/5610047002/)

Let’s simply calculate how many occurrences of illnesses and of deaths were unavoidable because the virus entered the country before we were aware or it versus how many illnesses and deaths were avoidable if Trump and his executive team performed competently. How well did we do, and are we doing now, minimizing Covid-19 as much as is humanly possible? How do we apportion the responsibility for the sheer numbers and deaths due to this virus? Keep reading; I’ll tell you. (channeling my best Jimmy Buffett)

As we are about 4% of the world population, we should only have about 4% of the global cases of covid19, not 22% of them. Right? Even if we were at an infection rate of 4%, we would be only an average performing country, in our handling of this Covid-19 global pandemic. Wrap your mind around the fact that Trump’s performance is 5 times or 500 percent worse than the “average” for the rest of the entire world. That includes highly industrialized countries. That includes very economically poor and healthcare impoverished countries. Does that make you feel – like “we’re number 1?” I think not. Trump has made us his own “S***hole country” and he tanked the US economy. This resulted in businesses closing, businesses appealing for federal welfare funds for them; individuals losing their jobs, their homes, their medical care coverage if they were fortunate enough to have had health insurance.

The “Trump Virus,” the Trump administration’s incompetence, and the republicans in congress being complicit by not fighting to protect the American people, resulted in congress providing trillions of dollars to businesses and individuals to prevent a total collapse of the American economy. Trump awarded to large corporations, money that they did not need or in many instances, did not deserve. This was like the old political adage of, “politicians and corporations lining up at the pig ‘welfare’ trough.” Most of the money went to the rich, to large companies, and to Trump’s pals. The stock market is mostly doing well. But the financial situation for most Americans is terrible. And we’re still messing around allowing healthcare workers, other front line workers, innocent young people, elderly people, all to contract Covid-19 because Trump is missing intellectually and ethically related synapses that allow him to understand how he should have solved this. His republican congressional bloc is silent or actively lying and enabling this terrible medical, public health, and financial crisis to continue. 

Let’s now drill down a bit and translate the number of deaths to something we can more easily convey. Again, as we are 4% of the world’s population, we should have no more than 4% of the global deaths if we are just performing as an average, “C” performing student or country, right? Yes, that is correct. The US Covid-19 deaths using Johns Hopkins University numbers, on July 27, 2020 were 147,253. However, 4% of the global deaths of 650,146 would have been 26,006 deaths at this point. What were our results? Not the 26,006 deaths that a “just average” country should have experienced. I repeat, we had 147,253 deaths. Trump and his associates have failed to keep the country safe. Huh!

“Sooo,” the difference between our actual deaths of 147,253 and what 4%, or 26,006 represents is 121,247 deaths. Those are attributable to Trump’s failed leadership; those are from the Trump Virus. 

On August 19, 2020, US deaths were 172,564. Compared to 4% of the 783,243 global deaths, the Trump Virus is responsible for 141,234 avoidable deaths, due to his hatefulness, lack of caring for citizens’ wellbeing, and incompetence.

On August 26, 2020, the US experienced 178,758 deaths. At 4% of global deaths of 820,835, the US should have had no more than 32,833. That means the difference of 145,925 are attributable to the Trump Virus, those that sadly occurred from Trump’s hateful neglect. (Global cases: 23,951,902; global deaths: 820,835; US total cases: 5,788,185; US deaths: 178,758; Johns Hopkins University as reported on CNN).

By August 31, 2020, global deaths were 848,084 and US deaths were 183,431. At 4% of the global deaths, the US should hot have had more than 33,923. That translates to a minimum of 149,506 Trump Virus caused deaths.

What is the cause of these “avoidable” deaths? I submit that they are due to this “very stable genius”- Trump. His screwups and calloused neglect has cost America an additional 121,247 deaths as of the July 27, 2020 numbers. The Trump Virus deaths grow continuously, every day, making the US death rate close to the worst in the world, even though they are preventable.

So, is this the “China Virus” as Trump crudely pontificates? No matter how he constantly destroys, denies, deflects, it is and has been the “Trump Virus” since early 2020. As the numbers continue to grow daily, no matter how Trump tries to distort the figures or hide them, all occurrences of this disease and deaths greater than 4%, every single day, are exclusively due to Donald J. Trump and his unscrupulous   staff and congressional party allies.

His devotees will say I am anti-Trump. After learning how demented and destructive this dictator wannabe is, I am against Trump’s stupidity, dishonesty, corruption, malevolent actions.

The following may help allow Trump and the Covid-19 deniers’ individual “freedoms to reign” while not encroaching on the wellbeing of others. The country needs to develop a specific, individual pledge that the deniers will voluntarily take. There will also be a national data base made available to them. All of these deniers of science; those declaring that the Covid-19 pandemic is fake news; the brave people like the motorcycle riders from all over the country who meet, infect each other, go back to their homes all over the country, and infect people in all of their cities; people who rudely slap the hand of the person, or cowardly hit and break the jaw of the young person who is offering them a mask as they enter an establishment without a mask…all of them, I’m sure have the integrity, honor, braveness, to take a pledge that they only mingle with fellow deniers and stay far away from mask wearing people. To demonstrate their high integrity and belief in the harmlessness or fakeness of Covid-19, they will sign-up on that national database that is available to all 50-states’ health facilities. The list confirms that when those deniers contract Covid-19, they and their loved ones will not present at any healthcare facility for medical assistance, thereby further endangering the workers in those facilities. Instead, they will go isolate themselves, suck it up, and cure themselves. All healthcare facilities will check the national database and honor the refusal of any treatment that those brave and wise people declared. “Everyone wins!”

Remember, throughout his adult life, Trump has behaved in a hateful and bigoted manner, takes no responsibility for anything, is angry and vengeful to anyone who does not genuflect to him, and tries to discredit everything that is not what he wanted. As Doc Holiday explained to Wyatt Earp, in ‘Tombstone,’ when Wyatt asked “What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?” Doc: “A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.” Wyatt: “What does he need?” Doc: “Revenge.” Wyatt: “For what?” Doc: “Bein’ born.”

Trump’s operational mode is “revenge.” By seeking revenge for everyone who disagrees with him or who displeases him, he justifies his “destroy, deny, deflect actions.” He is incapable of sensibly, responsibly, and honestly fixing anything. Everything Trump touches, dies. He created the Trump Virus. And it’s killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.