As World War I was coming to an end, the Spanish1 flu epidemic killed an estimated 675,000 Americans. Would a Trump presidency produce a similar body count? asks the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf.
Well, probably not, Conor, but I, in turn, have a question for you. Would the United States recover as quickly, and as completely, from a Trump presidency as it did from the Spanish flu? And the answer to that one would be a big, fat, terrifying NO.
Donald Trump is easily, easily, the most corrupt and unqualified individual ever nominated for the presidency by a major party, and, indeed, since the demise of segregation, the most repulsive individual to stand for major office at the state or federal level—governor, U.S. representative, or senator.
Donald Trump’s entire campaign has had one theme, and one theme only: the United States is mired in the greatest catastrophe of its entire history. There is no measure too radical, too ruthless, not to be embraced, if only it will “save” us. Over and over, Trump has assured us that he will not be bound by any restrictions on his actions whatsoever—and, in particular, he will not be bound by his own words. Yet his mainstream supporters, and his “tolerators”, insist that he doesn’t mean all the “bad” things he says, over and over again—like building a huge wall between the U.S. and Mexico and forcing Mexico to pay for it, or stealing Iraq’s oil, or torturing the wives and children of suspected terrorists—and does mean all the “normal” things he says, like cutting taxes on the rich and appointing “conservative” Supreme Court justices. In other words, we can trust him because he doesn’t mean what he says.
The presidencies of George Bush and Barack Obama have already reduced civil liberties in the United States far below what anyone could once have imagined. A Donald Trump presidency will surely do the same. In other words, the only thing we can know for sure about a Donald Trump presidency is that it will be worse than we can imagine.
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Severe illnesses, and deaths, from the “Spanish” flu were particularly common among service personnel, as might be expected from the frequently appalling quarters then felt to be appropriate for the enlisted men back in the day. As a consequence, details of the epidemic were suppressed in the name of wartime “morale” (really, in the name of concealing military incompetence). Since Spain was one of the few countries not at war, the flu was written about openly in the Spanish press, which became the major source of information about the epidemic. ↩︎
