Trump’s Gravestones, Carved by Reality Denial

“Ignorance is death, knowledge is life. Life is of very little value, if it is a life in the dark, groping through ignorance and misery.”—Swami Vivekananda

“Ignorance is death”—could there be a better description of U.S. President Donald Trump? Ignorance is Trump’s stock and trade, his life’s mission. He luxuriates in it and wears it as a crown. As a lover of ignorance, he surrounds himself with fellow travelers. He picked a Fox News blowhard as secretary of defense, an anti-vaxxer nutcase as his secretary of Health and Human Services, and a totally unqualified sycophant as national intelligence director. In short, some of the government’s top officials charged with the health and defense of the American people are totally unqualified.

As they say, what could go wrong?

At the same time, Trump empowered Elon Musk and his band of spoiled children to begin mass terminations of federal employees. Moving at the speed of light, using both terminations and pressured early retirements, they forced people out by the thousands, often without the slightest idea of what job they did or what disruptions their departures might cause. And surprise—almost immediately agencies started asking some of these terminated, but indispensable, civil servants to return to their jobs.

At least the families of those who die will know their loved ones gave their lives for a greater purpose—tax cuts for the wealthy.

As much as his ignorance in running the government has harmed this country, the worst part isn’t his own incompetence at governing. It is the way he has managed, with the help of the far-right machine, to reengineer the thinking of millions of people to view ignorance as a virtue. Under this “through the looking glass” view of the world, shooting from the hip is better than expertise and careful reflection. And this extends to the belief that one’s own gut feeling on scientific subjects, such as global warming and vaccinations, is more reliable than multiple studies produced under the scientific method.

Trump is the Johnny Appleseed of ignorance. It sprouts wherever he goes. And this ignorance has proven to be deadly. The best-known example, of course, has been his response to the Covid-19 pandemic during its earlier, more deadly, phase. From the beginning, Trump did everything he could to minimize the danger and spread conspiracy theories. He advocated quack remedies, discouraged mask wearing, and undermined scientific evidence. According to a study in The Lancet, Trumps actions during the early years of the pandemic caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

And these deaths were more concentrated in red states than in blue states. For many of these victims, trusting Donald Trump was their last mistake.

But the countless thousands of unnecessary deaths that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic almost seems small by comparison with the expected death toll from Trump’s arbitrary cancellation of U.S. Agency for International Development payments for food and medicine to desperately poor people. It is projected that this action, if continued, will, by itself, cause 14 million preventable deaths by 2030.

But at least the families of those who die will know their loved ones gave their lives for a greater purpose—tax cuts for the wealthy.

And Trump is far from done. According to experts at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, his so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” will result in millions of people losing their medical coverage, which is expected to cause 51,000 or more deaths annually. And deaths are only a small part of the misery caused by loss of medical insurance. People without coverage tend to be sicker. They live in fear that one serious illness or injury will wipe them out financially. People living in rural communities face the potential loss of local hospitals due to reduced Medicaid payments.

Then, of course, there is climate change. It is estimated that global warming will result in 250,000 additional deaths every year from 2030 to 2050. What is most disturbing about Trump’s actions is that he is not just opposing new governmental efforts to fight climate change. He is aggressively attacking current efforts, public and private, to combat the problem. He began by dreaming up a nonexistent national energy crisis to push for increased production and use of oil, gas, and coal. At the same time, he has attacked, and continues to attack, environmentally friendly energy sources including solar and wind power—something that makes no sense from either an environmental or an economic standpoint.

Whether we like it or not, reality doesn’t give way to our personal beliefs. A particularly tragic example of this, as discussed above, involves the thousands of people who, with a big push from Trump, believed to the core of their souls that Covid-19 was a fraud. But the strength of their belief didn’t cause the virus to pass them by.

Ignorance is death. It always will be.