We’ve gone through the looking glass
The former president and some of his key co-conspirators have yet to be held to account for their alleged conspiracy to interfere with a federal proceeding and seditious conspiracy in the events of January 6, 2021. The violence and mayhem of that day was no accident, evidence shows. There were hundreds of injuries and millions in property damage. Multiple perpetrators have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. Hundreds of other arrestees have yet to be adjudicated. The dead are the dead. Trumpism kills.
It is clear that Donald J. Trump is an avatar of MAGA-nation’s status anxiety. He says what they feel. He hates the people they hate and gave them permission to do so publicly. Including releasing the racists, the xenophobes, and fascists among them from under rocks where public pressures had driven them in the latter half of the 20th century.
What remains a mystery is why any of them would fight and even die for a man who cares not a rat’s ass for any of them. Nothing, except for the political and economic support they represent and for the fawning adulation they supply him like heroin to his damaged and bottomlessly needy soul.
Whatever legal reckoning Trump faces will never address his culpability for the vast, uncounted number of MAGA followers who died following his mislead in dismissing the dangers of COVID 19. People who refused to wear masks because Freedom! People who refused vaccines for the same reason. People who bought into conspiracy theories about tracking microchips. People who sought quack cures Trump tossed out like chum. Even now, the survivors have committed themselves to claims that the vaccines for which Trump repeatedly claimed credit were themselves a hoax.
Thousands upon thousands died needlessly. Their families will never be whole.
I write this because I caught a piece of a story Saturday on This American Life of a father and brother who died of Covid. They were (I’m assuming from the snippet I heard; I will listen to the whole thing when it’s posted) among the MAGA victims of Covid whose ideological rigidity made them reject treatment and deny the severity of their illness. Their stories stand in for millions of others whose stories will never be heard, their numbers never be counted. There will be no justice for their surviving loved ones.
Even after millions died of Covid in 2020, many of them from Trump’s disinformation and incompetence, their bereaved families swarmed to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to fight and die for the unfeeling narcissist whose misrule contributed to killing their loved ones.
Looking Glass world made more sense.
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