For the first four months of 2020, Trump's team was actually trying to do something about Covid, even though he'd stupidly closed the pandemic offices Obama had created within the White House and the NSC after the Ebola scare.
Medical doctors were on TV daily; the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
By the second week of March, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. Trump's official emergency declaration came on March 11th, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome that week.
They even had a plan for the Post Office to distribute 650 million masks - 5 to every American household - to stop the pandemic.
But then came April 7th, just three weeks later, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.
The opening paragraph laid it out:
"The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates, according to data released by several states and big cities, highlighting what public health researchers say are entrenched inequalities in resources, health and access to care."
Other media ran similar headlines that day, and it led the news on cable and network television that night.
Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, it turned out, were Black or Hispanic, not white people.
White conservatives responded with a collective, "What the hell?!?"
From Tucker Carlson to Brit Hume to Rush Limbaugh and beyond, the entire rightwing movement turned on a dime that week.
The new official message was that it was now time to put Covid, lockdowns, and masks behind us and get the economy back to work in preparation for Trump's re-election in the fall.
That April 7th, 2020 front page story - that Covid was mostly killing Black people - echoed across the white supremacist rightwing landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.
Trump decided it was time to let more Americans die, because the economy was sagging and that could hurt his reelection chances.
On April 12th, Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up, and that he'd be announcing a specific plan to do just that "shortly."
If most of the deaths - outside of the elderly and infirm - were Black, well, to hell with doing anything about it. It's easier, after all, than trying to purge African Americans from the voting rolls.
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