It is reported that 4,400+ Americans died Tuesday as a result of contracting COVID-19. Trump is not to blame for the fact of COVID-19, nor for COVID-19’s entering the United States. But I believe he must bear the blame for a vast number of all the deaths. He minimized the threat of the disease, telling lie upon lie, for fear that the truth of COVID-19 might hurt “his” economy. His deceit and delays guaranteed that the United States would be almost wholly unprepared for the pandemic. He screwed up the response to the pandemic with his silly recommendations of cures and with numberless obstructions of the efforts of expert physicians and scientists.

By his words and example he started the anti-masker movement, and not wearing a mask came to be a sign of solidarity with Trump. He held some notable super-spreader events, infecting staff and guests at the White House and who knows how many at his maskless rallies. And now he and his incompetent political appointees have made a complete muddle of the vaccine program.

His mishandling of COVID-19 was not a pardonable lapse in judgement or a failure to realize the gravity of the pandemic. No, in a planned series of misrepresentations and delays he put what he perceived to be his interests before the lives of some 388,000 Americans so far, and the die-off has no end in sight. 

He is a mass murderer.