https://www.salon.com/2020/03/31/donald-trumps-murder-math-any-death-toll-under-2-million-is-a-very-good-job/
The only thing more stunningly dumb than the willingness of
Donald Trump's disciples to die for the sake of their cult leader's
approval poll numbers is the fact that Trump, this past weekend,
established a new and terrifying benchmark for "success" in fighting the
COVID-19 outbreak.
During a presidency that's beyond satire, no one really
anticipated that Trump's Red Hat militia would end up being a death
cult, but here we are. The cult's warped calculus is basically this:
Trump will only be re-elected with a prospering economy, but if COVID-19
decimates the economy, Trump could lose. So we have to save the
economy, literally at any cost, even if it means we have to sacrifice
older Americans (who typically vote Republican).
However, during the Sunday edition of the Trump Show, the
president swerved into Mad King territory once again with a remarkably
desperate and perhaps psychotic attempt to rescue his chances for
re-election. As the U.S. death toll nears 9/11 territory, Trump blurted
out that forecasts suggested the death toll could have been as high as
2.2 million Americans had nothing been done to mitigate the spread of
the virus.
From there, he landed on a startling new range for acceptable pandemic deaths in America.
"So you're talking about 2.2 million deaths, 2.2 million people from this," the president began.
"And so if we could hold that down, as we're saying, to 100,000 — it's a
horrible number, maybe even less — but to 100,000. So we have between
100 and 200,000, and we all together have done a very good job." Cutting
through his usual refrigerator-magnet sentence structure, Trump
preemptively congratulated himself for presiding over the deaths of
100,000 to 200,000 Americans.
