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On an unusually warm Saturday night in November, car horns and joyous cheers rang out from streets across the nation, President-Elect Joe Biden made his first speech in a parking lot in Delaware and my jaw unclenched, ever so slightly, for the first time in four years.
“(I)..will work with all my heart to win the confidence of the whole people,” promised Biden. The words ‘heart’ and ‘whole’ pierced my ears, like a newborn baby crying for the first time. Under Trump’s temper tantrum style leadership empathy had been absent from the White House. So as Biden swaddled a screaming America in his words and began to soothe the nation it became clear to me that Trump’s petulant behavior was his own undoing.
Back in 2016, Trump promised the American people the country would be “great again,”jobs would return to America for Americans, and that the economy would thrive. In fact, the only thing thriving about Trump’s America is Covid-19. As cases reach a record high across the country I cannot help but wonder how Trump missed what could’ve been his administration’s Hail Mary?
Politically speaking, the arrival of Covid-19 should’ve been a windfall for the Trump Administration. I, like many others, was horrified at the political advantage it could have potentially given President Trump providing he handled the pandemic response correctly. An America where Trump had listened early on to science, protected the people with a bountiful action plan to save jobs and lives could’ve been an America that happily re-elected Trump by a landslide. But this is not the America we see today.
Instead, Trump had no coherent plan for the American People. Instead, he chose to stoke the fires of xenophobia by referring to the virus as “Kung-flu virus” and the “China virus”. According to an Ipsos survey conducted in April, Trump’s racist remarks meant that more than 30% of Americans had witnessed someone blaming people of Asian descent for the coronavirus outbreak.
His commitment to dividing the nation and lack of empathy didn’t stop there. In true Trump fascism, sorry, fashion.. he held mask-less rallies across the nation causing outbreaks and spikes wherever he went. Not to mention, contracting the virus himself and infecting half the white house. In a recent survey conducted by Stanford, researchers looked into eighteen Trump rallies between June and September and analyzed the covid-19 data patterns in the following weeks for each rally. The research found that the rallies were ultimately responsible for more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. Concluding that these ‘superspreader’ rallies potentially resulted in more than 700 deaths, though they may not necessarily be those who attended. In what world is this acceptable behavior from the leader of the free world?
Covid-19 should’ve been a chance for Trump to unite the nation and to show the people he actually has heart and love for his country. The lack of empathy he has shown for the very people that elected him at such a crucial political and world juncture is astounding to me. On the one hand, I’m glad it was his undoing but on another, I am angry that so many people had to, and still are dying due to his negligence.
In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said that now is the time for the nation to heal. I hope that at the very least, Biden’s presidency can restore the reputation of the American Government to its people and to the world as an office of empathy, tolerance, and respect. His patience will be tested, his decisions mocked, but at least we won’t have to put up with him tweeting Fox News at 3 am. Make America Great Again? We’ll see.