You might think that Trump learned his lesson about underestimating a virus with the Covid pandemic back in 2020. That, however, seems not to be the case. Instead, he's endangering his own citizens and the rest of the world by pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, where global cooperation to confront a potential pandemic would ordinarily take place. And Kennedy is seriously considering pulling an almost $600 million contract with the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against bird flu. That's what I call -- to use a phrase of the president's -- Making America Healthy Again.
Kennedy has also postponed indefinitely the February meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's advisory panel on flu vaccines. This is the group that convenes regularly to make decisions about which strain of seasonal flu should be addressed by the current year's vaccines. Deaths from flu and attendant pneumonias vary across time. During the 2022-2023 season more than 47,000 Americans died of flu or flu-related pneumonia. Estimates of last year's deaths exceed 28,000. Without effective vaccines those numbers would have been -- and perhaps in the future will be -- much higher.
There are many other ways Trump's actions have killed and will continue to kill, including through the suicides of transgender youth denied affirming healthcare; or the deaths of pregnant people denied abortion care; or those of people who come here seeking asylum from political violence at home, only to be shipped back into the arms of those who want to kill them; or even of fired and despairing federal workers who might take their own lives. The list of those at risk under Trump grows ever longer and, of course, includes the planet itself.
As Elon Musk recently told podcaster Joe Rogan, "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." And the strategy of Musk and Trump is, in effect, to pile the corpses high enough that the numbers overwhelm our capacity for empathy.
People will die and, as was true of the cruelty of Trump's first term, their deaths are, in a sense, the point. They will die because he has undoubtedly realized that, no matter how long he remains president, one day he himself will die. His administration is, as he has told us, driven by a thirst for retribution. He is seeking revenge for his own mortality against everything that lives.
Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light
There is another murder I haven't even mentioned yet, a metaphorical killing of a particularly devastating sort, one that will doubtless lead to many actual deaths before we're done. I'm thinking, of course, of the death of our democracy. Many others, including Timothy Snyder, M. Gessen, and Anne Applebaum, have written about that process, already well underway, so there's no reason to rehearse the details here.
Contemplating this already violent moment in our history, this genuine break with the rule of law and all that's decent, brings me back to the meditation on death with which I began this piece. I've long loved poet Dylan Thomas's villanelle on old age, "Do not go gentle into that good night." As I climb higher into my seventies, it speaks to me ever more directly. The first three lines are particularly appropriate to these Trumpian times:
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
I've always been a partisan of the "rage, rage" faction. I'm not going gentle. Give me all the "heroic measures." No do not resuscitate or DNR for me. And yet, paradoxically, our rage at the dying of democracy's light will indeed drag some of us, I believe, burning and raving into that good night.
I know that certain of us may well be called upon, perhaps sooner than we imagine, to die for liberty here in this country. It's happened before. I doubt I would (or should) kill for freedom, but I hope I would, if put to the test, be willing to die for it.
Copyright 2025 Rebecca Gordon
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