Trump and his henchmen are engaged in a systematic effort to debase Americans’ human dignity and devalue American life.
Based on the impact of their actions, we must admit they are succeeding. Their bold-faced lies from Trump’s first days in office, such as Sean Spicer’s insistence that Trump’s inaugural crowd was the biggest in history or Trump’s insistence, without a shred of evidence, that millions of people voted illegally for Clinton – both easily disproven – set the stage for the avalanche of lies that have followed.
Trump has systematically shaken our instinctual predisposition toward the truth. Telling the truth and expecting others to do the same have been, until recently, accepted as universal ideals. Truth-telling is a basic sign of respect- for ourselves and each other. Clearly, you do not lie to people you respect because it is counterfeiting the currency of human transaction.
It is an insult to be lied to. We say to ourselves- ‘Our president doesn’t have enough respect for us to tell us the truth. We elected a man who insults us every day! And he gets away with it.’
Today, Trump is spreading the racist trope that the coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab, without providing a shred of evidence for this divisive charge. He will use this baseless claim to gin up his xenophobic base.
Before this accusation has been definitively debunked, he will have moved on to another, heedless of the consequences of such hatemongering on real human beings or the damage he does every day to our national culture.
By telling outrageous lies on the national stage, Trump and his accomplices have succeeded in debasing our entire society.
What of Trump and his henchmen’s respect for human life? Let us look at the evidence. Trump and his accomplices have been systematically dismantling our nation’s environmental regulations.
I think most rational people agree that these regulations protect the life of people, animals and plants and, in the case of regulations to address climate change, of the planet itself. Trump’s announced departure from the Paris accords, his repeal of the 2014 Clean Power Plan, his threat to CAFE standards, failure to act on dangerous agrichemicals, weakening of endangered species protection, labeling requirements and support for pipelines, drilling in the Arctic and off-shore all undermine the most basic requirements for human and animal life- clean air and water and wholesome food.
Before Trump, politicians could not openly admit they were valuing corporate profit ahead of human life. Trump and his henchmen feel no such constraint.
Their devaluation of human life goes beyond failing to ensure clean air and water. When Trump instituted, with no warning or preparation, a travel ban against seven predominantly Muslim countries in early 2017, which has since been extended to many more embattled countries, what was the human toll?
Parents and children were suddenly unable to unite with their families. Their crime? Being Muslim. People die when they are suddenly, coldly, cut off from their loved ones.
Trump began the inhuman policy of separating babies and children from their refugee parents at our southern border. No records were kept, and no plan was formulated to reunite the families that were heartlessly torn apart. This was done in America by our government.
The parents’ crime that led to their children being torn from their arms? They had fled for their and their children’s lives from their war-torn, crime-ravaged homes. By law, the US must process refugee requests for asylum. Trump and his accomplices forced refugees with no means of support to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard.
Later, they were relocated to Guatemala and El Salvador, with no provision for their well-being. Now, the coronavirus has been used as an excuse to not hear any asylum cases at all. Refugees are desperate people with no resources. Trump’s refusal to give them timely hearings is a death sentence for many of them.
Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria. Trump’s solution- throwing rolls of paper towels to people-Americans- who had lost everything. This is what passes for empathy and assistance under the Trump regime.
The American people are being indoctrinated into the sick idea that the lives of darker-skinned people are unimportant- the lives of ‘the other’ do not matter. In this coronavirus pandemic, we are learning that only the president and his inner circle deserve protection. The vice president arrogantly informed the staff at the Mayo Clinic that he did not need to wear a mask because he and the president are tested every day.
Anyone else in the country tested every day? Apparently, that is what is needed to stay safe but obviously regular citizens cannot expect to be fully protected. No wonder widespread testing is not happening. That is a luxury only available to Trump and his cronies.
On April 29, the president’s son-in-law (we can be sure he is tested regularly) said of Trump’s handling of this crisis, “The federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story.” The next day, Trump boasted, “We did all the right moves.”
These statements are both clear expressions of Trump and his accomplices’ disdain for American lives and, of course, further erode our quaint notion that we are entitled to the truth. If the spectacle we are witnessing as the virus claims over 2000 American lives every day were a Harry Potter novel, Trump would be a stand-in for Voldemort and his henchmen Deatheaters.
Not only are Trump and his inner circle not disturbed by the deaths of nearly 70,000 Americans as of May 1, they are proud of it! Any remorse? Any empathy for the fallen or their families? Instead, we are subjected to this bazaar display of self-congratulation!
Under Trump, our dignity as Americans and as people is subject to daily debasement. The value of our lives is constantly discounted, at the rate of 2000 of us each day. A debased culture is a defeated culture.
The devaluation of our lives makes deprivation and death, on a mass scale, permissible. We are surely becoming dehumanized by this lack of concern for our lives exhibited by this monstrous man, who we inexplicably chose as our leader.
Matthew Frisch
Oyster Bay Cove
