Don The Con Has Blood On His Hands

The numbers tell the basic story. Donald John Trump, the name of the impeached president that will surely appear on indictments once his criminal regime is ended, learned from U.S. intelligence channels the threat posed by China’s coronavirus on Jan. 22.

He thwarted testing and other health safety preparations so that he could minimize the dangers to the public and help bolster the stock market and jobs reports that are central to his re-election campaign.

Meanwhile, at least two prominent GOP U.S. senators, Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina and Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, whose husband Jeffrey Sprecher chairs the New York Stock Exchange, dumped millions of dollars of stocks in apparent insider trading during mid-February after they heard U.S. intelligence confidential briefings on the dangers the virus posed to the public and markets.

Remarkably, this came within months of the sentencing of Trump’s first two congressional supporters in 2016, Reps. Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California, to long prison terms for insider trading and illegal use of campaign funds for personal expenses, respectively.

As of March 1, the United States reported just 89 cases of coronavirus because of the difficulties of testing and other lack of federal action to warn the public.

One month later, on April 1, some 211,000 cases were reported in the United States.

By the end of this week, the New York Times was reporting that figure as having passed 300,000 U.S. cases, causing more than 8,000 deaths. More than 3,500 of those deaths have occurred in New York State amidst a crisis in the availability of vital medical and protective equipment, the newspaper reported in Staggered U.S. Braces for More Infections as Death Toll Rises Above 8,000. 

The withheld medical equipment, part of a pattern whereby Trump suggested that federal stockpiles would be allocated on the basis which state governors were “appreciative” and otherwise nice to him, raise well-founded suspicions that Trump and his team led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner are once again using federal resources to benefit his re-election campaign and fat cat financial cronies.

In Trump to Governors: I’d Like You to Do Us a Favor, Though, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, right, drew an apt parallel to the Trump crime gang’s use of $400 million in congressionally allocated military aid last summer.

The purpose of witholding the life-saving military aid in violation of law and government policy? To try to extort the announcement of a seeming bogus “investigation” of front-running Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, according to many courageous impeachment witnesses who testified before the House despite threats against them and other prospective witnesses by the White House.

“There are a lot of parallels between the president’s behavior now and during the whole Ukraine scandal,” she quoted Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who led Trump’s impeachment prosecution, as telling her. “Certainly the most apparent is his demand that the governors basically pay fealty to him, praise him, or they’ll suffer consequences.”

Trump’s extortion attempt against Ukraine formed the basis of the House impeachment of Trump in January before his acquittal by Senate Republican loyalists. Some of those voting for acquittal, most notably Maine Republican Susan Collins, claimed in essence that they could acquit Trump without hearing evidence because he had learned his “lesson” via House proceedings and would not again violate his Constitutional oath and the public interest.

That’s obviously wongr, as indicated by, among other things, the U.S. death toll and Trump’s unceasing efforts leverage his presidential powers during the pandemic for personal and partisan gain.

The Boston Globe summed up the Trump team’s shocking behavior on April 1 in an editorial entitled, A president unfit for a pandemic, with the subtitles “Much of the suffering and death coming was preventable. The president has blood on his hands.”

Our Justice Integrity Project has sought to cover these many horrific developments and scandals by extensive daily news summaries, segmented into monthly installments, as here. In the meantime, we have reduced our output of opinion columns.

But there comes a time to pull the materials together into larger themes. The numbers and the illustrative images tell much of the story. So does a daily listing of Trump’s own words, particularly during the early part of the pandemic when he somehow thought he could get away with conning the public into thinking there would be no serious health problem.

He lied. Americans died, as did untold thousands more around  the world in a crisis of leadership fostered by many like-minded dictators and cover-up artists.

But those horrific results haven’t stopped Trump from a new round of conning the public with his daily White House press briefings, by which he apparently seeks to replicate his successes on the fake reality show “The Apprentice” and at his “Make America Great Again Rallies.”

Last week, Trump claimed that he will be vindicated if the U.S. death toll is simply the 100,000 to 240,000 his team foresees if things go well.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Trump’s protector, false claimed that Trump was too preoccuppied with impeachment to focus on the virus.

That’s false since McConnell ensured by thwarting witnesses and exercising iron control over fellow Republicans that impeachment was essentially over by the end January. Trump meanwhile undertook many golf outings, campaign rallies and fund-raising events with cronies.

Washington psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, who has treated many high-ranking official over his four decades of practice and has authored books profiling the mental state of recent presidents, two weeks ago warned that Sociopath Trump ‘could see dead bodies’ from coronavirus ‘and step over them.

The future is always murky, but not so the recent past: The man is a liar who is criminally negligent in the deaths already of thousands.

I give you the President of the United States wrote blogger Paul Maraschino in providing the research findings below:

Trump’s response to the coronavirus (his words):

January 22: “We have it to totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”

February 25: “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

February 26: “We’re going very substantially down, not up.”

February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

February 28: “We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

March 6: “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on coronavirus.”

March 9: “This blindsided the world.”

March 9: “The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the coronavirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.”

March 10: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 13: National Emergency Declaration

March 13: No, I don’t take responsibility at all.” 

Among the many tragic ironies of our current American situation is that George Conway III, right, an activist conservative lawyer and husband of Trump’s acerbic counselor Kellyanne Conway, has been recently leading public warnings against the president and his danger to society.

Citing the famous language of the Republican Senator Howard Baker during Watergate, Conway and a co-author wrote for the Washington Post last month:  What did Trump and Congress know about the coronavirus, and when did they know it? 

According to a Post report, they wrote, quite possibly a lot, and for quite a while: Intelligence agencies ‘were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat.’

They continued:

These intelligence assessments about the global danger posed by the virus made the rounds in the executive and legislative branches, sources told The Post, but the American people weren’t told about them. Now Americans should know precisely what their government knew about an impending crisis that would jeopardize their livelihoods and lives.

These reports should be declassified, to the maximum extent feasible, and released as soon as possible, along with the identities of senior administration officials and members of Congress who learned of it. That’s especially true given how Trump repeatedly told the public that the impact of the virus on the United States would be minimal.

That’s in the future. We already know plenty.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig