Oh, so now she tells us.

In a CNN interview that aired the other night, Dr. Deborah Birx – remember her? Trump’s point person on the pandemic? – essentially declared that her former boss was responsible for mass death. Those of us with functioning brains have known this all along, of course, but now Birx has joined the bandwagon: “I look at it this way. The first time (when the virus first hit), we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” if Trump had acted more aggressively.

Hmm, let’s do the math. “All the rest of them” translates into 450,000 deaths. Granted, we can’t pin them all on Trump, but one new study does conclude that strong, consistent national leadership in 2020 would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Indeed, Birx now says, Trump was furious last summer when she publicly warned that the spread of the virus was getting worse: “Everybody in the White House was upset with (me) and the clarity that I brought about the epidemic. I got called by the president. It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear.”

Actually, what’s truly difficult to hear are Birx’s desperate attempts to scrub away the stain of her service to the sociopath. Because the stuff she said back in the day can never be flushed down the memory hole – like, for instance, this gem about Trump, uttered with a straight face on March 27, 2020, in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network: “He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

I do have a smidgen of sympathy for Birx, who had a stellar career as an AIDS researcher, Army physician, and global AIDS coordinator before she landed in Trump’s clutches – proving, yet again, that the guy irrevocably soils whoever he touches. The only way to work for him, even when so many lives were at stake, was to either hail his non-existent genius, or to sit mute in his presence while he riffed like an ignoramus: “I see the disinfectant, where it knocks (the virus) out in a minute. And is there any way we can do something like that” – turning to Birx for a response – “by injection inside or almost a cleansing…So it would be interesting to check that.” Birx knew that was bonkers, but she subsequently defended him anyway, telling Fox News that Trump was “digesting” the disinfectant information, and he wanted “to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue.”

But today, having heard Birx’s retroactive confession, many of us are asking: Why didn’t she speak out forcefully a year ago, when surely she knew that Trump would get a lot of people killed? Why didn’t she quit in protest?

Well, it’s complicated. The honor roll of high- and middle-ranking public servants who have quit on principle is actually quite tiny. The most noteworthy members are William Jennings Bryan in 1915 (protesting U.S. policy toward Germany); Anthony Lake, Roger Morris, and William Watts in 1970 (protesting the invasion of Cambodia); Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus in 1973 (refusing Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate prosecutor); Jerald terHorst in 1974 (protesting Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon); Cyrus Vance in 1980 (protesting the ill-planned Iranian-hostage rescue); Peter Edelman, Mary Jo Bane, and Wendell Primus in 1996 (protesting Bill Clinton’s workfare law), and Walter Shaub (director of the federal Office of Government Ethics, who quit six months after Trump took office). Shaub later told me, “I felt that staying on the job would make me complicit. If I stayed, I feared that I would be window dressing for corruption.”

Birx stayed on the job – and wound up as window dressing – because, naive as it sounds now, she thought she could do some good. She did manage to escape Trump by traveling a lot, meeting with state officials, trying to mitigate the worst of the pandemic at the grassroots level. But her laughable huzzahs to Glorious Leader can’t be erased, her long stint as his enabler can’t be excused, and history will judge her harshly.