In short, yes.

Not in a blatant, knife-in-the-gut, push-us-into-a-ditch-and-drive-away method. Not even an obvious shoot-us-in-the-middle-of-Fifth-Avenue-and-not-lose-any-votes way, either.

No, the method to their murder madness is more insidious, and evil: they want to incompetent us to death. They want to dumb decision us to death. They want to bludgeon us with buffoonery and strangle us with stupidity to death. If you’ve been paying attention to the slow-motion unraveling of this nightmare from which we cannot awaken, the trump administration has downplayed the threat of Coronavirus from the very beginning.

From his very first comment on the matter, wedged in between golf outings and hate rallies…

trump assured (lied to) the American public, saying “No, we’re not (worried) at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.” That was on January 22, 2020. He would go on to issue increasingly preposterous and irresponsible statements, as if he either truly had NO idea what was actually happening, or he knew and just didn’t care. Neither possibility is acceptable, especially when you consider that today, the number of cases has ballooned to over 500,000 with over 20,000 fatalities here in America.

Months went by, as he continued to downplay the severity of the situation, aided by his state-run TV (Fox News and OANN), and he neglected to make any preparations for the oncoming onslaught of COVID-19 crisis chaos. He even approved the donation of 17.8 tons of PPE (personal protective equipment) to China, the country from whence the virus appeared to originate.

He then unnecessarily decided to sprinkle a little racism into the unfolding chaos:

While most news and health organizations were referring to the disease as “Coronavirus” and “COVID-19,” trump decided to unleash the fear and hatred of his ignorant masses onto the Asian American community by repeatedly calling it the “Chinese Virus.” Incidents of violence immediately spiked against Asian Americans, with trump’s tiny, bigoted fingerprints all over them.

At one point, trump even declared “I take no responsibility at all” for the lackluster response and preparation for the train wreck we ALL saw coming, choosing instead to blame the lack of testing and supplies on President Obama, on state Governors, and the “Fake News” media, of course. At a time when America needed to be able to rely on a steady, unifying hand on the wheel of governance, we were instead stuck with a petty, petulant “Blamey Jamie,” a thin-skinned toddler throwing tantrums on the national stage.

Meanwhile, prominent GOP members of Congress have been conspicuously silent in the face of this flagging, floundering effort to protect the lives and livelihood of millions of Americans. When the time came to provide stimulus packages to get money in the hands of regular Americans, they were more concerned about bailing out major corporations and billionaires than the rank-and-file workers of their own party. Eventually, a deal was agreed to, but it was one that many critics believed fell way short of what would be needed to sustain Americans while getting the runaway virus under control. To date, a staggering number of nearly 17 million Americans has applied for unemployment due to the stay-at-home orders.

But despite recent promising signs showing a slowing of hospitalizations and infections, America is FAR from ready to end the war and stop the social distancing. A measly 1% of U.S. citizens has been tested, and there is much to be learned about people who are asymptomatic who could potentially pass the illness unknowingly. And the steady drum beat from the right is suddenly demanding to “reopen the country,” with trump’s prodding, of course.

The Metrics?

He just announced on Friday that he is about to make the “biggest decision I’ve ever had to make,” based on metrics he said, pointing to his big, stupid head, “The metrics right here.” So, he’ll be deciding to reopen that which he never closed – trump NEVER closed the nation, instead leaving it to Governors to institute their own policies, despite the need to flatten the curve simultaneously. The Governors of Texas and Florida dragged their heels towards eventual orders to close their states to all non-essential activity.

The “reopening of America” too soon will needlessly expose the rest of us, who have already been sheltered in place for a month, to the risk of infection. But trump, who plans to run for reelection on the “strength” of the economy, is anxious to jumpstart it at any cost – and that cost will likely be the lives of Americans who are infected because of the relaxing of stay-at-home and social distancing restrictions.

And, speaking of the election, trump and the GOP are determined to make it as difficult as possible for fed-up Americans to evict them from office. The safety afforded by social distancing brought the prospect of mail-in ballots clearer into focus; Democrats seem overwhelming in favor of this, while Republicans are concerned that more people allowed to vote will end their political careers. trump even publicly railed against it, falsely claiming “Mail ballots — they cheat. OK? People cheat.” There is no evidence of major voter fraud instances anywhere in the United States.

Luckily, all six of the swing states already allow their voters to cast mail-in ballots, no matter the reason. But a larger issue looms: due to the coronavirus, the United States Postal Service is on the verge of insolvency. And the White House has already indicated that it is dead-set against a cash infusion to save the USPS. If you don’t have anyone to deliver mail-in ballots, then you can’t get wiped off the face of the political map with those ballots. That would force millions of Americans to risk their lives with in-person voting in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

Wisconsin already showed us a preview of this scenario, as GOP-weighted Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision disallowing an extension for the absentee ballot deadline. This forced Wisconsinites to line up to vote, six feet apart, in the thick of the pandemic. Many voters in places like Milwaukee had to contend with additional challenges, as the polling stations for a population of 600,000 were reduced from 180 to just five.

Unsurprisingly, 4 out of 10 of Milwaukee’s voters are minorities. And, to add insult to infection, it was learned that America’s minority population is disproportionately affected by the coronavirus. To make matters even worse, the reliable base of the Democratic party voters are…you guessed it: minorities.

I’m not saying that this entire crisis was somehow intentionally engineered to murder thousands or millions of Americans, in order to remain in power.

But as the pandemic progressed, the intentional misleading of the public, the lack of preventative action, the failure to utilize the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of supplies, the rush to reopen the country (which was never even closed in the first place), and the insistence upon in-person voting all point to a willful negligence.

If you take your hands off of the handle of a baby stroller while standing on a steep hill, and then watch it pick up speed downhill before even thinking of moving, it doesn’t matter how hard you tried to catch that stroller. If the baby in that stroller goes flying into the air, and somehow survives the impact with the ground, it won’t matter if you dangerously walk that critically-injured infant through traffic to get it to the hospital. In this case, the negligence is just as bad as an intentional act of murder.

This is a bizarre new normal we are in right now. Nobody knows if it will ever get back to “old normal.” After 9/11, our society had to change in order to adjust to the reality that we could be savagely attacked, at any moment, by enemies from outside our borders. Similarly, there were warnings that went unheeded prior to those attacks, and thousands of people died while our Republican leadership was asleep at the wheel.

America, and the world, underwent fundamental change, as the saying “If you see something, say something” became ubiquitous, and we were each tasked with reporting anything out of the ordinary. Whenever an unattended package was left in a public place, we were quick to alert authorities. Those terrorists wouldn’t catch us sleeping again, because we were ever vigilant, looking behind our backs for unseen threats.

Who would have ever imagined that the biggest threat to our lives would be neither unseen or outside our own borders? We will survive this crisis, in spite of the criminal ineptitude of the trump administration and its GOP enablers which threatens our lives AND our livelihoods. But we will need to adapt in order to survive: we MUST continue to practice social distancing, extreme sanitary habits, and the use of protective wear. Most importantly, we will now need to be vigilant to report and resist (see something/do something) the daily, mounting threats from an untrustworthy GOP and its feckless figurehead.

It is the ONLY way we’ll live long enough to put those neglectful baby stroller handlers out of office.