If there was justice in this world, the fake president who in a mere eight months has helped kill a quarter of a million citizens would be indicted for criminal negligence. It’s right there in the statutes. Criminal negligence is conduct in which a person ignores a known or obvious risk, or disregards the lives and safety of others.
But since Trump won’t be held accountable that way, the best alternative is to take him down the way the feds got Al Capone. I’ll explain what I mean, but first let’s set the scene.
On the eve of the election that Trump has decisively lost, he scoffed at the press’ coverage of the pandemic. He told his rally saps: “That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television – ‘Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.'” That’s right, sociopath. When more than 1000 innocent Americans die preventable deaths each day, that does tend to warrant coverage.
But now we know that Trump’s public fecklessness is mirrored by his AWOL recklessness. (Yeah, I know, big surprise.) Courtesy of The Washington Post, here’s a new report from inside the crime scene:
Since Election Day and for weeks prior, Trump has all but ceased to actively manage the deadly pandemic, which so far has killed at least 240,000 Americans, infected at least 10.9 million and choked the country’s economy. The president has not attended a coronavirus task force meeting in “at least five months,” said one senior administration official with knowledge of the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details…
“I don’t know that I think that’s where his focus is,” said one senior administration official. “But I know that’s where our focus needs to get back to.”
The president is no longer regularly briefed on the pandemic by his team of doctors, and he rarely reads the daily virus reports…The reports have grown increasingly grim in recent weeks, aides said, but are largely ignored in the West Wing.
Covid is a downer for Trump, so he’s done dealing with it. He has abdicated on the seminal life-and-death issue of our time. Jack Chow, a U.S. ambassador for global HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush administration and a former World Health Organization assistant director general, offers this succinct assessment:
The duty of a president is to protect the national security of the United States, and this is the most prominent disease of mass destruction America’s ever faced, and we have a commander in chief who has run away from the problem and has made it worse.
Trump should be convicted and jailed for criminal negligence, but since that won’t happen, we have to root for the next best thing. Which brings me back to Al Capone. As many of you probably know, he didn’t land in the slammer for his serial murders. He served eight years for financial crimes.
That’s our best hope for Trump. He has been rejected by a record number of voters – at last check, 78.7 million – and when he’s stripped of power on Jan. 20, he’ll be fresh meat for the New York prosecutors. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be indicted for anything, but it’s well known that the Manhattan DA has been digging into his business dealings and spotlighting potential financial crimes – including insurance fraud, tax evasion, grand larceny and scheming to defraud. As one ex-deputy Manhattan DA says, “There are subpoenas and seizures and documents all over the place.”
At this point, any efforts to hold Trump criminally accountable for anything are dearly welcomed. Consider this passage in the new Washington Post report:
One senior administration official described Trump’s government as performing an elaborate “Kabuki theater, pretending that Biden didn’t win,” a pantomime that has further hurt the administration’s virus efforts.
Nothing will bring back the Americans who’ve been lost thanks to Trump’s dereliction of duty. Nothing can undo the wreckage he has wrought. On that front, the max we can hope for in ’21 is that President Biden and his public health team, once ensconced, will return us to a semblance of normalcy. But if Trump winds up in the criminal docket, weighed down by crippling lawyers’ fees, we might finally have the overdue opportunity to bump elbows with Lady Justice.