Trump is Necropolitics Personified
Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times confirms what I have been thinking. Trump isn’t incompetent, but instead wants to kill a bunch of people.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes about Trump and the politics of death:
“The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe wrote in a 2003 essay called “Necropolitics.” “Hence, to kill or allow to live constitutes the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes.” I read this line not long before the pandemic reached American shores, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
President Trump has lately refused almost any action to control the virus and largely abdicated his responsibility for helping Americans weather the economic crisis. But he has pushed meatpackers to go back into dangerous plants, urged businesses to reopen despite danger to the public and hindered the production and distribution of protective gear and other critical materials.
Trump has power. But in the face of Covid-19, he doesn’t use it to facilitate life as much as he does to dictate exposure to death.
New York Times: Trump Would Like To See You Now
At first, Trump downplayed COVID-19 until mid-March when he declared a National Emergency that shut down the economy in an attempt to save people from death and illness from the virus.
I remember hearing his heavy breathing when he was talking about how bad things were in mid-March.
President Donald Trump says he’s offered a grim assessment of the worsening novel coronavirus outbreak to his 13-year-old son.
“I’ve spoken actually with my son, he says, ‘How bad is this?’” Trump said during a coronavirus news conference on Monday, describing his conversations about the crisis with his youngest son, Barron.
“It’s bad, it’s bad,” Trump added. “But we’re going to be hopefully, a best case (scenario), not a worst case, and that’s what we’re working for.”
But, immediately after reports came out that COVID-19 was infecting black people more than others, Trump called for reopening the economy. Trump even called for meat plant employees to be forced back to work and unemployment benefits shut off for people to force them back to work.
President Trump signed an order late Tuesday declaring meat processing plants a “critical infrastructure” that must keep operating because mass coronavirus closures — more than 22 in the past few weeks — are threatening the country’s meat supply.
His declaration prompted immediate outcries from union leaders, politicians and worker advocates who said the order further threatens the lives of plant employees, thousands of whom have tested positive for COVID-19.
The people hardest hit by the coronavirus blazing through meat packing plants are the workers themselves, who toil under extreme conditions, often with limited protection.
Trump is now threatening to cut off education funding and deport foreign students if schools don’t hold in-person classes in the fall.
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
Trump is banking on the human tendency to become desensitized after exposure to horrors and to accept newer and greater violence against fellow humans. Genocide occurs when leaders keep training a country’s people to accept more and more violence against others.
In other words, genocide is not a qualitatively distinct category of human behavior — it follows ordinary principles of human cognition, affect, and behavior that certain societal and political conditions (such as political upheaval, prior genocide, autocratic rule, and low trade openness) allow to escalate into more and more severe violence. This continuum of destruction which often begins with seemingly harmless acts of blaming a group for one’s misfortune or supporting exclusion of this group as a solution to one’s problems also implies that we need to be aware of the creeping normalization of hate speech and exclusionary ideologies.
Psychology Today: The Psychology of Genocide: Beware of the Beginnings
Trump counted on desensitizing America’s outrage when he separated thousands of children from their parents and sent them away — some to be lost forever, reports the Washington Post.
Reports of federal authorities losing track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children in their custody. Scathing criticism over children being taken from their migrant parents at the border. Proposed rallies.
Trump wants to kill people by his failure to act, negligence in acting, and actions designed to downplay and dismiss expert health opinions regarding the best way to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Trump is a cruel person, according to multiple reports about how he has treated family members, other businesses people, and people who have come across him.
Donald J. Trump has a cruel streak. He willfully causes pain and distress to others. And he repeats this public behavior so frequently that it’s fair to call it a character trait. Any single example would be off-putting but forgivable. Being shown many examples across many years should make any decent person recoil in disgust.
I have been thinking Trump wants to lead people he doesn’t like into mass death for a while, but it is all coming into view clearly now. Trump wants to infect as many people as possible in the United States with COVID-19. This is why he refuses to advocate for public health and safety measures, such as social distancing and mask wearing. This is why Trump continues to want to hold large campaign rallies where people are packed into enclosed venues. This is why Trump wants schools to reopen.
It is clear the Trump idealizes (loves) Kim Jung Un who kills his political opponents. Trump defends Vladimir Putin killing journalists, saying America kills people also.
Salon’s Chauncey Devega writes that Trumpism is a death cult that wants to kill people they view as “useless eaters”:
What are they really saying? Donald Trump and the Republican Party are now openly willing to sacrifice those Americans they consider to be “useless eaters” — in this case older people, people with pre-existing health conditions and anyone else who may die from the coronavirus pandemic.
November’s election isn’t just about one political party’s idea versus another. It is about life and death. We already have had 130,000+ coronavirus deaths in the United States, per the CDC. Experts fear the death toll will continue to increase since the federal government is not doing much to help with a national response and because Trump is failing to assist or interfering with public health efforts.
Trump wants to kill a bunch of people. His actions or lack thereof have already lead to many thousands of people needlessly dying.
This year’s Presidential election is a life or death matter.
Vote for humanity.
Vote for anyone other than Donald Trump.
Vote against any of his enablers in the Republican party, especially anyone who expresses the need to “sacrifice” people for profits.
Vote them all out of office.
