(Illustration: ‘Genocide No. 1‘ (1971), by Daphne Odjig, found here).

On the eve of T-Rump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, it’s obvious his time in office was 100-percent inhumane, though, inciting an insurrection only second in a gargantuan list of horrible shit. most-hideous the one he’ll probably never have to face any accountability — the handling of the COVID pandemic, which has of this afternoon, killed 464,768 Americans, and all that dying in just one year and two days.
Now a virus medical-research model predicts more than 630,000 deaths in total before summer.

Although any pandemic will kill, and sometimes kill a lot until it’s brought under control. Yet with COVID-19 the death toll could have been far less if there’d been any positive action at all from a national level. Instead the T-Rump administration deliberately bungled the whole affair, from beginning all the way to the end.
In May 2020, death toll then at ‘just‘ 71,000, Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves tweeted T-Rump’s coronavirus response “is getting awfully close to genocide by default,” and a year later with variants, mutations and vaccine roll-out fuck-ups, the situation is even more closer. (Real-good, healthy positive item — beyond historically-fast vaccines — now vs this time last year is Joe Biden’s team is in place).

Latest entry in T-Rump’s massacre record came today from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which released e-mails from the Department of Health and Human Services indicating COVID testing was way-downplayed because politics — if you don’t have virus symptoms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised, you don’t need a test. Wrong!
Details via CNBC this morning:

In the emails, former HHS scientific advisor Paul Alexander defended the change in testing policy and downplayed the importance of testing people without symptoms, saying it “is not the point of testing.”
Alexander was brought into HHS by Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump ally who led the department’s communications last year before departing abruptly after he accused CDC scientists of sedition.
…
In September, the CDC quietly reversed the guidance, saying that anyone, even those without symptoms, who has been in close contact with an infected person needs a Covid-19 test.

Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., chairman of the committee that’s been investigating allegations of political influence in the nation’s top health agencies under the Trump administration, said in letters viewed by CNBC to White House chief of staff Ron Klain and HHS Acting Secretary Norris Cochran that the emails are fresh evidence of political interference at the CDC under Trump.

The email, Clyburn said in the letters, “shows that political appointees were involved in the decision to change CDC’s guidance, and that the Trump Administration changed the guidance for the explicit purpose of reducing testing and allowing the virus to spread while quickly reopening the economy.”

One would hope, in a just world of course, that someone like the T-Rump and all his henchmen preforming the deeds would face judgment on their actions. COVID is such a closed, quiet disaster of death, we’ll way-likely never see a Nuremberg-like process for crimes against humanity in its aftermath.
On such a question, though, I did find a piece by Noah Berlatsky at ForeignPolicy from a couple of weeks ago, which also notes there’ll never be justice for the T-Rump and his killing ways. However, there might been evidence for one:

The numbers are stark: The virus has killed more Americans than died in the Vietnam War or in World War I.
It’s also more people than died in many events that are well established as genocide.
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks on the Kurds at Halabja in 1988 are estimated to have killed about 5,000 people in Halabja.
The former Yugoslavia’s genocide of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s saw about 8-10,000 of them in the Srebenica massacre, and around 100,000 dying in the war as a whole,

There’s unlikely to ever be an international trial of Trump officials for crimes against humanity or genocide.
In that sense, the discussion is going to remain an academic one.
But it’s worth thinking about genocide and the president’s response to emphasize that the administration is culpable for letting people die by the tens and hundreds of thousands.
…
For the U.N. and international prosecution of genocide, intent is important—there has to be evidence that a government set out deliberately to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
At first, at least, that might not seem to be the case in the United States, where the death toll has scythed through the whole country.

And yet, there is some evidence to suggest that the Trump administration did in fact intend to use COVID-19 to target certain political and racial groups.
According to reporting from Vanity Fair, Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner shelved a federal COVID-19 testing plan because he believed that the virus would mostly affect Democratic states, and the administration could then blame Democratic governors for deaths.
Blue Democratic cities are disproportionately home to Black people and other minority populations.
A federal plan to allow deaths in blue states inevitably and predictably disproportionately facilitated the deaths of Black people and other people of color.

Tomorrow a focus on just an incitement to insurrection, nothing heavy…