Donald Trump is culpable for deaths in the US and beyond due to his Covid-19 pandemic response, according to Noam Chomsky, from making states deal with the crisis individually to cutting the World Health Organization funding.
The progressive activist and author is less than pleased with the president’s coronavirus response, and insists his small government attitude and slashing of healthcare and research funds has put the US in a poor position to handle a pandemic.
“That’s something that Trump has been doing every year of his term, cutting it back more. So [his plan is] let’s continue to cut it back, let’s continue to make sure that the population is as vulnerable as we can make it, that it can suffer as much as possible,” Chomsky told The Guardian in an interview promoting the launch of Progressive International, a group “for the world’s progressive forces, with a mission to make solidarity more than a slogan.”
The institution is meant to “dismantle the structures” that economically lead to “very ugly consequences for much of the population of much of the world.”
While few would expect the ‘Manufacturing Consent’ author to be a fan of Trump’s policies – he supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and has said he will be voting for Biden if he is the nominee for the Democrats in November – Chomsky accused the president of actually causing deaths, both through his insistence that state governors be separately put in charge of Covid-19 responses, and his pulling of funds from the WHO (World Health Organization).
Trump relying on state governors to individually deal with the pandemic is “a great strategy for killing a lot of people,” Chomsky says, adding that Trump has taken this approach because it may improve “Trump’s electoral politics.”
On the president defunding the WHO following criticism of their response to the coronavirus, the author says this will lead to deaths in other nations that rely more on the group, such as Africa.
“It’s much worse than that,” the progressive said after being asked if the president is “culpable” for the deaths of Americans, “because the same is true internationally. To try and cover up his criminal attacks against the American people, which have been going on all of this time, he’s flailing about to try and find scapegoats.”
There are currently over 1.3 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the US, as well as nearly 80,000 deaths.
Trump has pointed to both the WHO and China – the virus is believed to have originated in the city of Wuhan — as being accountable for the global spread of Covid-19, even suggesting the virus could be man-made and may have begun in a Chinese laboratory.
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