RIBEIRÃO PRETO, SP – (Opinion) Donald Trump consciously used lies to bolster his presidency, starting with his inaugural address, where he claimed more people had gathered to watch him take office than had watched Obama eight years previously.
Trump’s lies were many and variegated, often wrapped in the idiosyncratic security blanket his press agent called “alternative facts”. The Washington Post has collected over 20,000 lies and misrepresentations made during his four years in office. They egregiously include denying his own racism, while calling all brown-skinned migrants from beyond the Rio Grande “bad hombres” and all BLM protesters “thugs”.
Trump’s most persistent series of lies, however, was all about the coronavirus. Ironically (“corona” means crown in Latin) it was these lies, repeated for over nine months, which ultimately denied Trump the crown he most sought – another term as President.
On November 2nd, Atlantic Magazine published an article entitled “All the President’s Lies About the Coronavirus”. It is a dauntingly long read. We offer a brief recapitulation.
Trump lied about the origin of Covid-19, saying the Chinese manufactured it. He lied about cutting off travel from China – more than 40,000 people came from China within a month after his “ban”. He lied about the potential spread of the virus, saying in February it would be gone by Easter and warm weather.
He denied the effectiveness of masks and refused to wear one. He touted unproved medicines as preventives or cures for the disease. He denied the severity of the virus, saying it was “harmless for 99 percent of people”. He claimed lockdowns and quarantines were worse than the disease, alleging they would cause more deaths (suicide) than the coronavirus. Every few months, he said the pandemic would “disappear, like a miracle”; or that it was “fading away”; or that it was “under control”; or that the US was “rounding the final turn”. Most recently, he said a vaccine would be ready before Election Day.
Not one of these claims was true. By Election Day, the second wave of Covid-19 was ravaging America: a cumulative 10 million people had contracted the disease and nearly 250,000 had died from it.
To his peril, Trump ignored these devastating facts, which were well known to all Americans, and tried to make them magically disappear, saying: “As of November 4th, nobody will mention Covid any more!”
Trump doubled down on his coronavirus mendacity, conjoining it to another of his favorite lies: postal ballots lead to widespread fraud. He exhorted his followers NOT to vote early or by mail, but rather to vote in person at the polls. Millions of his fearless followers drank the rhetorical Kool-Aid, and waited until Tuesday, November 3rd to go stand in line and cast their votes.
On the other hand, twice as many millions of voters, especially those who, unconvinced by Trump’s lies, were worried about catching Covid-19 while standing in line, decided not to wait, but rather chose to be safe and vote early, either sending ballots by mail or dropping them off in official ballot boxes before Election Day, avoiding crowds.
American citizens cast approximately 146 million votes for president in this election: some 75 million for Biden and 71 million for Trump. Of that total, an astonishing 100 million citizens voted before Election Day.
Among those 100 million early voters, most observers agree that Biden supporters, heeding his advice to trust science more than his opponent’s lies, far outnumbered those who voted for Trump; it is even possible that Trump won a majority of the 46 million votes cast on Election Day itself.
The additional early votes became the fulcrum for Biden’s eventual victory. Swing states where early votes were counted first showed Biden running up a lead; those where early and postal votes were counted last – including the crucial “flip” states Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – at first showed Biden running behind, but then saw him gradually overtake Trump as the tallies were completed and the news networks could declare Biden the Winner – and Trump the Loser.
To paraphrase a familiar adage, “He who lives by the lie, dies by the lie.” That is Donald Trump’s legacy.