Donald Trump is a danger to the health and safety of all Americans.
Either through malicious intent or sheer incompetence, the president’s gross mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis has led to nearly 160,000 deaths so far, and that number continues to rise exponentially. In the face of this incredible tragedy, Trump continues to paint a patently false picture of a situation that he claims is improving.
Trump gives us false hope, saying that a vaccine will be produced at warp speed when all the experts say it will take time. He wants to endanger our children by sending them back into public-school classrooms, while his own son Barron will be staying home from his private school.
Instead of listening to his scientific experts, Trump has smeared Dr. Anthony Fauci for telling Americans the truth. When Dr. Deborah Birx finally tried to level with the people over the weekend, he attacked her too, calling her pathetic.
The president and his toadies have pushed an ineffective drug, hydroxychloroquine, on the American people for months, even though Fauci and the Food and Drug Administration have said it is ineffective and potentially harmful. Apparently, the administration bought so much of it, now they are sitting on a useless stockpile.
As the crisis escalated, Trump mocked people who wore masks, turning it into a political issue that is prolonging the crisis. Anti-maskers are now causing consternation in shops across the country, as they themselves fall ill.
The president pushed for society to reopen far too quickly, leading several Republican governors to do it, with disastrous consequences in states like Florida, Georgia, Texas and Arizona.
Trump then ignored public-health officials and negligently staged campaign rallies in Oklahoma, Arizona and South Dakota, going so far as tying chairs together in one venue and removing stickers that encouraged physical distancing in another. If the campaign was trying to kill people, it succeeded in at least one case. Former presidential candidate Herman Cain is now dead after he attended the rally in Tulsa and refused to wear a mask or distance.
Meanwhile, as Americans drop dead left and right from the virus, Trump has created his own opaque paramilitary force from federal agencies like the U.S. Marshals, Customs and Border Protection and the Bureau of Prisons that is attacking peaceful protesters, journalists, demonstrating mothers and military veterans. Or, as the president and Attorney General William Barr like to refer to them, “violent anarchists.”
In the president’s latest assault on our cherished institutions, he is attacking voting rights, threatening to sue the state of Nevada for expanding mail-in balloting, and intentionally slowing down the mail. Trump is actively trying to discredit an election he can’t win, calling it rigged, and refusing to say he will step aside if he loses. Trump wants to force people to stand in line for hours in the middle of a pandemic, making them chose between their safety or their ballot.
For four years, Trump has used the phrase, “Enemy of the People,” when referring to the free and independent news media. It is a phrase dictators use to attack the press, because journalism is essential in a functional democracy to report on the corruption and excesses of a rogue regime.
Our fourth estate has been doing its job with surgical precision against a president who has gone as far as turning a blind eye to a foreign enemy that is paying bounties to kill our military personnel.
At the end of the day, there is only one man who is doing more damage to this country -- its people and institutions -- than any other in our history. In today’s United States of America, there is only one true Enemy of the People.
His name is Donald Trump.