The Twilight Zone
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John H. Taylor
Trump is a prophet of hate and death who will end up being remembered as the most bloodthirsty leader in our history. Deepening the shame for the United States is that most of his victims are people of color. Three groups need to take a longer look at his bloody footprints — those who support him, those who haven’t been paying enough attention, and especially those who carry out his policies.
Members of the latter cohort should stop. Those who don't will need to be held accountable when our Trump captivity ends. This Supreme Court may give presidents criminal immunity. But it doesn’t apply to most who follow illegal orders. Whether we bring Trump’s civilian and Pentagon operatives to justice will help history decide whether these policies and tendencies were principally Trump’s or emblematic of the hidden heart of our country.
The scariest number to watch is those who have died or will die as a consequence of Trump’s interruption or cutoff of foreign aid programs, especially those combating the spread of HIV-AIDS in Africa. Boston University and “The Lancet,” in separate studies, say 700,000 died already. That is just a little less than the deaths in the Civil War. In this case, they are all laid at one man’s feet.
Trump would still live in infamy even if it’s a third of that. In our 250 years, no single presidential decision had caused more death than Harry S Truman’s to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed about 200,000. Truman‘s apologists say it was necessary to end World War II. One struggles to think of any decent justification for Trump’s decision to let so many die. The worst deficit spender in history, he doesn’t care about the money. Losing tens or hundreds of thousands just because Trump didn't care about the people brings new meaning to Hannah’s Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil.”
I’ve been following the USAID cuts all along and have difficulty understanding why they don’t provoke more outrage. One reason may be the vagueness of the numbers. Members of Congress and activists should press harder for transparency and accountability. Another reason is that only a few journalists such as Nicholas Kristof are paying attention. The third reason is that these deaths are happening far away. Our victims are people of color in foreign countries. Our relative indifference reflects poorly on a nation ostensibly pledged to the universal values of liberty and justice for all.
I have a friend whose critique of the west’s shutdown during Covid was that it endangered those in the developing world who depended on our economic vigor. Whether right or wrong, he's the only person I'm aware of who even made the argument. During the pandemic, we were of course thinking about ourselves. In that way, at least, we were just like Trump. The big question for history will be how far the comparison goes. Victims being largely out of sight of most of us is the common denominator in Trump’s empire of death. He’s killed scores of men of color on the high seas as part of a PR ploy to justify seizing Venezuela’s oil. It resulted in few if any protests. Nor did many seem to weep for the Cuban soldiers who didn’t go home after Trump killed them while he was kidnapping Maduro, which he did just so he could put in a more pliable leader who would give him the oil.
Hundreds of brave U.S. volunteers have been killed or wounded in a stupid, risky war against Iran that has worsened our strategic position in the region and our security worldwide, by depleting weapon stockpiles and thus weakening our ability to deter aggression against Taiwan and elsewhere. Trump has also killed perhaps 3,000 Iranians. Journalists have revealed that he did this, against experts’ advice, in a preposterous bid to be the president who finally solved the Iran problem. He thought it was worth the risk to get himself the props. That’s thousands of our fellow human beings deprived of their lives, parents of their children, children of their parents, and spouses of their spouses, all to satisfy Trump’s vain lust for history’s favor. While he's tried to cover up the number of Americans killed or wounded, Iranian deaths don't seem to bother him at all. I wish they bothered Americans a little more.
A racial dynamic also applies when it comes to Trump’s domestic bloodbath. Fifty-two people, almost all of them people of color, died in ICE custody during the first 500 days of Trump’s second term. Trump’s roundups and detentions are the icepick point of a racist policy that includes refugee status for white Afrikaners only, blood libels of our Haitian neighbors, and vicious attacks on Somalians.
Racial politics also influence the way Trump spends. We’ve read ad nauseam about the principled if severe fiscal conservatism of Russell T. Vought, who runs the office of management and budget. It turns out that he's just another low-rent, ward-heeling political hack. Last fall, Trump’s Department of Energy predictably recommended canceling 600 Biden-era energy grants. This presented an opportunity to trim liberal pork. But Vought canceled only 284 of the grants. Officials admitted that 283 were canceled because the states that would have received them had voted for Kamala Harris. Vought kept the cash gushing for the Trump states. Nationwide 84% of Trump’s voters are white. Vought’s not a fiscal conservative so much as a big-spending New Dealer for mostly white people.
I don't believe we're a racist nation. But the Trump years have shown that we are capable of being codependent with racist leadership. Polls and journalistic accounts made clear that millions of Americans were disturbed by Trump’s roundups and cruel treatment of immigrant workers. We just weren’t disturbed enough. Most of the time, we’re preoccupied with getting and spending, affording groceries and keeping our jobs. We didn’t care for what Trump was doing. But we by and large went about our business.
Renee Good and Alex Pretti should never have died, but at least they didn’t die in vain. It was only after ICE gunned them down in cold blood that our heart of decency warmed anew, and Trump realized that his policy was finally hurting him politically. ICE is still a threat to millions. But the deaths of two whites in Minneapolis moved our hearts and body-blocked Trump in a way that hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocents of color at home and around the world simply did not. May we at least learn the right lessons from our failure of vision.
