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Thinking the Unthinkable: Do Republicans Want Some of Us to Die?
We must reckon with an administration that wants some of us to go away.
Jul 10, 2025
“Well, we all are going to die,” Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst responded to a constituent who said “people are going to die” because of the cruel provisions of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” Ernst is correct, we are all going to die, but what she and the Republican Party appear to want is for specific groups to die.
That’s a shocking statement, and a hard one for us to make. But before you dismiss it, look at the evidence that’s accumulated over the years.
Republicans’ lack of concern for the lives of others appeared during the pandemic in a push to reopen businesses before vaccines and drugs were available. This would greatly increase Covid-19 transmission. Republicans railed against and dismantled every public health mitigation strategy. They knew that the deadliest toll would be on the elderly, infirm, migrants and the poor—the most vulnerable and the least welcomed by Republicans. Texas Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick supported reopening, arguing that grandparents should willingly risk death by Covid-19 to save the country’s economy for their children and grandchildren. Arizona’s former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey also placed the economy before human lives, taking numerous steps to undermine public health strategies. In the end, the pandemic death rates were higher in Arizona than any other state.
The infamous “Big Beautiful Bill” allows Republicans to further undermine the health of those they disfavor, with its draconian funding cuts to safety-net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
The Republican plan, to let Covid-19 rip to save the economy, held an unspoken benefit for them; Covid-19 deaths would remove unwelcome people—overwhelmingly elderly, Black or brown, poor or living with disabilities—from the rolls of the social programs that Republicans dislike. A cold indifference for the lives of others was in play.
Concurrently, Republicans spread misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines and masking, with President Trump being the single largest driver of Covid-19 misinformation. This turbocharged the present-day anti-public health, anti-science, anti-vaccine sentiments that endanger the U.S., culminating in the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a nonscientist and anti-vaccine advocate, to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Kennedy and Trump have methodically weakened the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Kennedy systematically removed vaccine experts, replacing them with anti-vaccine cronies. His mounting campaign to cease vaccination will allow the return of serious and deadly diseases. Once again, this will have the greatest adverse effects on groups unwelcomed by Republicans. Kennedy and Republicans have also cut funding for HIV vaccine research and suicide hotlines for LGBTQ+ youths, and are doing all they can to ban gender-affirming care for young people. All of this endangers the lives of groups that Republicans scorn.
The infamous “Big Beautiful Bill” allows Republicans to further undermine the health of those they disfavor, with its draconian funding cuts to safety-net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). These programs serve the most vulnerable U.S. residents—those with disabilities or who experience poverty and already struggle for adequate healthcare and nutrition. Ultimately, the bill would end access to healthcare and adequate nutrition for 14 million of the most vulnerable people in the U.S., intentionally endangering their lives.
And let’s not forget Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz, the Republicans’ detention center for migrants. The design and location of the center is not conducive to sustaining health or life. The cruelty of the place delights Republicans.
It doesn’t stop with the unwelcome in America. The Trump administration’s closing of USAID removed U.S. humanitarian and development assistance worldwide to people in the worst situations. USAID provided food, clean water, lifesaving medicines, and assistance for farmers; kept women and girls safe; and promoted peace. Due to Trump’s cruel closure of USAID, as many as 95 million people will be denied basic healthcare and nutrition, potentially leading to more than 3 million preventable deaths per year. The halting of funding for USAID, as well as the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), could cause an additional 4-11 million new HIV infections and up to 2.9 million HIV-related deaths between 2025 and 2030. Further, Kennedy has pulled out of the vaccine alliance Gavi, an organization that has paid for more than 1 billion children to be vaccinated worldwide.
These cruel decisions endanger the most vulnerable around the world. But Republicans will never care about these Black and brown people who come from “shithole” countries, according to Trump. In their eyes, they are among the unwanted.
Some may see the Republicans’ plans as 21st-century eugenics to improve the white race by diminishing everyone who is not white, straight, nondisabled, Republican, and Christian. Many are reluctant to talk about this because it seems so unthinkable, but we must reckon with the strong possibility that this administration actively wants some of us to go away. Look at what is happening, and remember that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
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From Texas to Covid, Trump Washes His Hands of Deaths on His Watch
The president has a long history of refusing to take responsibility and shifting blame on to political rivals.
Jul 10, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump may not be very good at running things, but when it comes to shifting blame, he is truly world class. As the magnitude of the disaster in Texas becomes clearer, the one thing we can be certain of is that Trump will accept none of the responsibility.
He will insist that his decision to have mass layoffs at the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and National Weather Service (NWS) had nothing to do with the state’s lack of preparedness for the storm and the inadequate response. At this point it is not clear whether the layoffs at the agencies played a role in the warnings given or the speed of the response to the floods.
The Texas offices were clearly understaffed. However, we don’t know whether that impeded their operations in important ways.
He routinely makes absurd and ridiculous statements which would be treated as a major scandal if they came from the mouth of any other politician, but instead are dismissed with an “Oh, that’s Trump” from the media.
We do know that global warming makes events like the Texas floods both more common and more extreme. For that reason, we certainly can blame Trump’s efforts to promote global warming with increased subsidies for fossil fuels and ending support for electric vehicles and clean energy. We can anticipate many more weather disasters in the years head thanks to Trump’s policies.
Weather and natural disasters are far from the only area where Trump refuses to take responsibility for his actions. The economy shrank at a 0.5% annual rate in the first quarter. This was after it grew 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024 and 2.8% for the full year.
Nearly every forecaster expected the economy to keep growing at a healthy pace through 2025. However, Trump’s tariff threats, budget cuts, and layoffs at the federal level managed to quickly end the economy’s growth streak and push it into negative territory in the first quarter he was in office.
Naturally Trump responded to the bad news on growth by blaming former President Joe Biden for giving him an “economic disaster.” In reality land, Trump was handed the best economy of any president in more than half a century, with low unemployment falling inflation, rising real wages, and a unprecedented boom in factory construction.
Probably the all time classic for Trump denying responsibility was his response to the pandemic. He made it clear that he wasn’t especially concerned about how many people got sick or died from Covid-19, he was only concerned that he not be given the blame.
At the start of the pandemic, there was an outbreak on a cruise ship. Trump said that he wanted the passengers to be kept on the ship so that the number of infections reported in the United States would not increase. In a campaign speech that summer, Trump said he ordered his staff to slow down the testing for Covid so that there would not be so many cases reported.
But Trump’s best moment was when he complained “the cupboard was bare,” and blamed former President Barack Obama for a lack of equipment and protective medical gear needed to deal with a pandemic. In fact, Obama had left considerable stockpiles to deal with a pandemic, but the more important point is that Trump had been president for more than three full years at that point.
If there were inadequate stockpiles, that was 100% on Trump. If he is to be taken at his word, Trump never even bothered to check on pandemic preparedness the whole time he had been in office. That was an astounding level of ineptitude.
Trump’s complaint says everything about the way he thinks. Rather than owning up to the reality of the situation, Trump absurdly sought to blame Obama for what was obviously his own failing.
The reporting on Trump’s complaint also says a huge amount about how the media adjusts its reporting to Trumpian standards. Rather than ridiculing Trump for what was obviously his own failing, it tried to evaluate the accuracy of his complaint about the stockpile Obama had left more than three years earlier.
Unfortunately, this sort of affirmative action for the son of a billionaire has been a regular feature of reporting on Trump. He routinely makes absurd and ridiculous statements which would be treated as a major scandal if they came from the mouth of any other politician, but instead are dismissed with an “Oh, that’s Trump” from the media. The idea that Trump is an adult who should be held responsible for his actions seems too difficult for many reporters to grasp.
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Top Medical Organizations Warn RFK Jr. Putting American Kids 'At Grave and Immediate Risk'
"Truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary... he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies," stated a new lawsuit.
Jul 07, 2025
Six major medical organizations on Monday filed a lawsuit against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alleging he is putting American children at "grave and immediate risk" because of his policy on vaccines.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit—including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Massachusetts Public Health Association, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine—charged that Kennedy earlier this year made a "baseless and uninformed policy decision" when he removed vaccinations against Covid-19 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) official immunization schedule for "healthy" children and pregnant women.
The organizations emphasized that unless Kennedy's decision is reversed, "all children remain at grave and immediate risk of contracting a preventable disease" and further warned that it "exposes... vulnerable populations to a serious disease with potentially irreversible long-term effects and, in some cases, death."
The plaintiffs further charged that Kennedy's directive removing the Covid-19 vaccines from the immunization schedule was "but one example of the secretary's agenda to dismantle the longstanding... science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans."
The complaint then documented Kennedy's long history of statements and articles that have peddled false claims about the safety of vaccinations and pointed to his mass dismissals of staff at HHS and his appointment of likeminded vaccine critics to argue that "it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies."
Given this, the plaintiffs argued that Kennedy's decision to remove the Covid-19 vaccine from immunization schedules was "arbitrary and capricious" based on what they described as "vast and irrefutable evidence," including congressional testimony delivered by Kennedy in which he acknowledged that people shouldn't "be taking medical advice from me"; that Kennedy's directive directly contradicted an article published by the Food and Drug Administration days earlier stating that pregnancy was a condition that "increased a person's risk of severe Covid-19"; and that Kennedy did not identify specific recommendations from professional staff that he used as justification to restrict the availability of the vaccine.
Should courts find that Kennedy's decision was "arbitrary and capricious" as alleged by the plaintiffs, they would have the power to enjoin the policy under the Administrative Procedures Act, which was also employed recently to halt planned mass layoffs at HHS. The medical organizations urged courts to declare Kennedy's policy change "unlawful" and demanded "the restoration of the Covid vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children ages six months to 17 years" of age.
The medical organizations' lawsuit against Kennedy's vaccination policy comes at a time when infections of measles in the United States have hit a level not seen in more than three decades. The Washington Post, citing data from Johns Hopkins University, reported on Monday that there have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles so far in the U.S. this year and the paper noted that this development "marks a public health reversal in defeating a highly contagious, vaccine-preventable disease as the anti-vaccine movement gains strength."
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