The tapes of the Woodward interviews leaves no room for doubt that Trump willfully and maliciously caused American deaths.
Quotes from February 7th tapes:
“It goes through air, Bob. … The touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky … delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. … we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here.”
“This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1%, and less than 1%. So this is deadly stuff.”
Quotes from March 19th tapes:
“Now it’s starting out it’s not just all people, Bob. But just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old … Young people too.“
“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down…”
Sometimes it can be difficult to find the line between hyperbole and accuracy. With Trump it doesn’t matter because they are the same.
Trump’s destruction of the US’s pandemic response infrastructure was a negligent act that risked American lives. Since March, he’s used the pandemic for perceived political gain in face of overwhelming evidence that people were dying unnecessarily. At first, it was negligent homicide but when he callously made it a political calculation, it became outright premeditated homicide. The legal term for that is Depraved Indifference Murder, which is second-degree murder in most states. Here’s the NY statute for Depraved Indifference Murder Penal Law § 125.25, which says:
DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE TO HUMAN LIFE refers to a person’s state of mind in recklessly engaging in conduct which creates a grave risk of death. A person has a depraved indifference to human life when that person has an utter disregard for the value of human life – a willingness to act, not because he or she means to cause grievous harm [to the person who is killed], but because he or she simply does not care whether or not grievous harm will result. In other words, a person who is depravedly indifferent is not just willing to take a grossly unreasonable risk to human life – – that person does not care how the risk turns out. 10 Depraved indifference to human life reflects a wicked, evil or inhuman state of mind, as manifested by brutal, heinous and despicable acts. It is evinced by conduct that is wanton, deficient in a moral sense of concern, devoid of regard for the life or lives of others,
For details check out these articles.
Here’s some of the highlights.
- Trump disbanded the pandemic response team in the National Security Council in May 2018.
- Trump defunded and eliminated more pandemic response infrastructure starting in July 2019 through February 2020, after the outbreak was well underway.
- Trump ignored multiple warnings about pandemic risk and a shortage of medical supplies, equipment, beds, and healthcare workers, which would lead to hospitals being quickly overwhelmed, starting in July 2019.
- Trump ignored multiple warnings of the impending coronavirus outbreak from the intelligence community, military, DHS and the public health community starting in November 2019.
- Instead of producing the World Health Organization’s (WHO) coronavirus released in mid-January, Trump wanted a test developed in the U.S., which put test production behind by almost two months.
- Trump cut his administration’s emergency funding request for coronavirus supplies by 75% In February 2020.
- Trump delayed providing social distancing guidelines by two weeks out of concern for the stock market response, which has been estimated to cost over 50,000 lives.
- Trump did not invoke the defense production act to create sufficient PPE and tests for aggressive testing of high-risk non-symptomatic people, nor did he create a nationwide contact tracing program.
- Trump and his administration have frequently and repeatedly downplayed the pandemic by saying things like “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” and “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it.”, which gave many people a false sense of complacency.
- Trump has repeatedly contradicted his administration’s official advice on social distancing and mask-wearing by encouraging people to not take precautions.
- By May 2020, Trump’s ad-hoc pandemic task force stopped functioning.
- In June 2020 Trump stopped funding testing programs.
- In June 2020 Trump restarted having campaign rallies, which are superspreader events that will culminate in the mother of all superspreader events, the Republican National Convention in August.
- To sum up his attitude, Trump said: “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”
