The Consent Of The Governed

The dark Trumptopia we inhabit is the world science fiction warned us abouthttps://t.co/C37jbBBpd3

— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 23, 2021

As president, Donald Trump would prove to be both a Martian and a Triffid. He would, in fact, be the self-appointed and elected stand-in for what turned out to be little short of madness personified. When a pandemic struck humanity, he would, as in that fictional England of 1898, take on the very role of a Martian, an alien ready to murder on a mass scale. Though few like to think of it that way, we spent almost two years after the Covid-19 pandemic began here being governed (to use a word that now sounds far too polite) by a man who, like his supporters and like various Republican governors today, was ready to slaughter Americans in staggering numbers.

As Trump's former White House Covid-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx recently testified, by rejecting everything from masking to social distancing in the early months of the pandemic (not to speak of personally hosting mass superspreader events at the White House and elsewhere), he would prove an all-too-literal murderer — though Birx was far too polite to use such a word. In the midst of a pandemic that has, by now, killed an estimated 17 million people globally and perhaps more than a million Americans, he would, she believed, be responsible for at least 130,000 of those early deaths. That's already slaughter on a monumental scale. (Keep in mind that, in the Trumpian tradition, from Florida's Ron DeSantis to Texas's Greg Abbott, Republican governors have continued in that distinctly murderous tradition to this very moment.)

About a million Americans dead, most of them due to the inaction and ineptitude of Trump in the beginning, and the vicious, amoral narcissism of the man now.  History as it was taught to me painted Josef Stalin as a monster for the millions he killed in Russia.  Now, we don't have gulags or prisons in Siberia (about which I know only from fiction and reputation, which is just another kind of fiction), and yes Stalin's death count is supposedly multiples of a million (I say "supposedly" because I really don't know what the accepted figure is per reputable and knowledgeable historians.  I'm not trying to clean up Stalin's record or reputation here).  But does the number really matter?  After 1 million, is it worse when the multiplier is 2?  3?  At what point does it become a real problem?

And Stalin didn't line people up and have them shot in mass executions running 24/7 across Russia.  Many of those deaths came from his Five Year Plans and other efforts at central control of the Russian economy; just as Mao Tse-Teung's Cultural Revolution killed people by cruelty more than execution, or the killing fields of Pol Pot.  Deaths were certainly ordered, on a massive scale; but complete failure of governance, of the responsibility of government and governors for the governed, were a prime cause of the massive slaughters.

Things weren't on that scale in America under Trump; but then Trump wasn't quite as bent on destroying people as Andrew Jackson was, and many Americans in the 19th century after him, on destroying the native populations, the indigenous people of these lands.  No, we didn't fall back to 19th century standards of death during covid; but we still look to Russia and China and Cambodia, and Germany under Hitler, for our historical (American) perspective on slaughter on a grand scale.  We ignore our past as if it had never happened.

Is it the numbers alone, then?  What of the natives here we slaughtered, by private endeavor as well as governmental effort?  No, can't be the numbers; must be when it happens in a foreign country.

Trump, as I say, hardly scaled the heights of piles of bones reached by Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot, or even by our leaders in 19th century America.  But will history one day look at Trump the way we look at Stalin, and wonder why We the People tolerated his disaster, his slaughter of so many of us, and why some minority of us engaged in it with him?  The sick and dying now, and the fourth wave of covid that is going to break over us, are almost entirely stemming from the unvaccinated.  And while I know unvaccinated people who are not MAGA-heads or really particularly political, the figurehead of that resistance is one angry, narcissistic man.

Will history see him as akin to Stalin?  Maybe not.  I would say no stronger than "maybe" because we are still in the midst of the slaughter he presided over. It may not be finished yet.  The question is less the number of bodies (at some points the numbers are abstractions.  A million bodies only sounds bad; two million sounds twice as bad.  But do we think of it that way?  We lost 50,000+ in the fields of Vietnam, and it almost broke our national heart.  We've lost 20 times that in less than 2 years, and we don't even seem to care very much, except about our ability to buy what we want when we want it.  Will history look at us and ask:  "Why did they put up with it?  How could they stand it?" Undoubtedly.  Even know there are reports some of us would do it again, enough of us to make that possible (3 years is still a political eternity; I put no stock in such reports).  But will history put that in the mix and wonder just what was wrong with us?  Because surely one man can not rule and even destroy millions, without the consent of the governed.

That's who we are; that's what we gave.  History will wonder why any of us would give it again; why we yielded so meekly the first time.