There are many ways one might measure Donald J. Trump’s performance as President of the United States of America: Campaign promises kept versus broken. Percentage of documented truths versus lies told. Health and growth of the economy. Standard of living for average Americans. Number of indictments and convictions. Number of staffers and cabinet members facing criminal charges. Billions added to the national debt. I could go on…
But there is another measure, one not yet cited by the media, but which the judgement of history will surely employ, of this beastly little man.
The death toll.
With the threat of full-blown fascism looming on our own soil, we simply cannot afford to wait for that reckoning.
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| ILLUSTRATION – Stable Diffusion |
Trump has already inflicted a malignancy on our country and the world. One which, for want of early, aggressive treatment, is strangling freedom and relegating this once-noble nation quite rapidly to third-world status.
The urgency, the gravity, of the threat facing our precious Democracy—and our essential humanity— demands our immediate attention. One can only pray it’s not too late.
The gravity of the threat facing our precious Democracy—and our essential humanity— demands our immediate attention.
COVID? WHAT COVID?
Death tolls can be difficult to determine. Just ask any public official trying to assess the impact of a natural disaster or epidemic. Seldom is there a simple stack of bodies to count. Not everyone succumbs at the same time. Some suspected victims may have died from unrelated causes. Some are collateral damage, dying months or years later from complications of the original horror. Some victims are never found.
So for Trump’s reckoning let’s start with one of the easier tallies, that of deaths attributed to his regime’s utter failure to manage the original COVID pandemic. In the U.S. alone the estimates vary from around 100,000 “unnecessary deaths” to 400,000 and more.* One thing’s certain: it’s a big number.
Then there’s the wider, global impact of the Crimbecile’s ham-fisted stabs at public health crisis management. His denials of COVID 19’s very existence. His ridiculing of vaccines. His withdrawal from the WHO and cessation of funding for USAID. His purging—just yesterday—of CDC Director, Susan Monarez, who dared stand up for the truth about vaccines.
These blunders will eventually kill millions of human beings—starting, as all such affronts seem to, with the poorest.
THE KILLING FIELDS
So, that’s just the count for one front in this moron’s deadly assaults on Democracy and decency. The Trump death toll is already mounting in nearly every sphere of the human condition.
There are just so many failings that tracking them is exhausting (part of the guy’s M.O., by the way). But here’s my—this non-statistician’s—bullet-point outline of the killing, both current and projected.
~ THE ENVIRONMENT
Trump wasted no time abdicating the US’s already-timid environmental-science leadership, dropping out, in his first term, of the Paris Climate Agreement, the world’s best hope for progress in combatting climate change.
Meanwhile, of more than 600 reported extreme weather events in 2024, 148 were classified as “unprecedented,” displacing 824,000 people and killing about 1,700.
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| PHOTO – Jesse Winter, Reuters |
His long-asserted denials of human-caused climate change, his scuttling of institutions charged with monitoring and regulating environmental impacts, and his alignment with corporations and the billionaire buddies who finance him are already killing people—thousands and thousands of them—through natural disasters, polluted air and water, and unsafe working conditions.
According to Google’s AI overview of vast amounts of data, global deaths attributable to extreme weather events average 40,000 to 50,000 people per year. So, a rough estimate for the years since 2017, when Trump decided climate change wasn’t sexy enough for him, totals roughly 315,000 deaths.
I’ll leave it to you to approximate how many of those lives could have been spared if Trump had exerted any leadership whatsoever. Whatever the tally, it will surely climb precipitously, as global climate change surges past the tipping point long forewarned by climate scientists.
His deep-seated appetite for flattery represents
a green light to our enemies’ ambitions.
~ FOREIGN POLICY
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| Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs |
What’s more, Trump’s defunding of the Agency for International Development (USAID) and disengagement from the World Health Organization (WHO) are invitations for further aggression around the world, amounting to a virtual death sentence for countless victims.
~ NATIONAL SECURITY
Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, his politicization of intelligence and his purging of career officials he’s deemed disloyal have hobbled our national security endeavors. He’s methodically sabotaged time-honored alliances with even our closest friends and neighbors.
His renouncement of America’s iconic generosity of spirit, his clumsy “America First” mantra, his embarrassing antics on the world stage, and his deep-seated appetite for flattery all represent green lights to our enemies’ ambitions.
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| PHOTO: Getty Images |
Debacles like this inevitably lead to wars…and countless more deaths.
~ DOMESTIC TERRORISM
Unconscionably, Trump has pardoned at least 1,500 members of his MAGA cult who'd been charged with deadly crimes during the January 6 insurrection. Projecting his persecution complex, the felon-in-chief has also pardoned at least five convicted murderers.**
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| PHOTO – Newsweek |
He’s also granted clemency to many individual and corporate fraudsters, tax cheats, anti-abortion activists, corrupt politicians and elections officials—virtually anyone who’s committed crimes abetting his own personal and political crimes.
By endorsing domestic terrorism perpetrated in his name, while at the same time clamping down on anyone—including peaceful demonstrators—who dare defy him, he sets the stage for more violence and death.
Trump’s assault on immigrants—many of them here
legally—has subjected families to unbelievable suffering.
~ AIRLINE SAFETY
Trump’s decimating of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) staffing and budgets, including DOGE’s dull-edge slashing of Air Traffic Control staffing, have already impacted the safety of flying, leading, some charge, to 67 fatalities in last January’s mid-air collision near Reagan National Airport. Many more deaths are inevitable.
~ IMMIGRATION
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| PHOTO - Genaro Molina, Los Angeles Times |
Trump’s outrageous assault on immigrants—many of them here legally—has subjected families to unbelievable suffering. And those arrested—often by unidentified ICE goons in unmarked vehicles with no probable cause nor legal recourse for suspects—face abhorrent conditions whose 2025 death toll (14 so far) has already surpassed that of 2024. ***
Internment of those arrested in a rapidly-growing number of ICE prisons (like the already infamous Alligator Alcatraz), and deportations to Gulags in countries like Uganda, where defendants have no family or cultural ties amount to virtual “disappearances.”
The death toll from abuse, neglect, murder and, most certainly, suicide, will be, by design, obscure.
~ GUN VIOLENCE
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| PHOTO - The Telegraph |
Every day, 125 people in the United States are killed with guns and more than 200 are shot and wounded. ****
That’s approximately 45,000 Americans shot to death annually, including hundreds who are victims of mass shootings (the latest just yesterday here in Minneapolis). Though hard to quantify, a significant percentage of these deaths must be called what they are: collateral damage from Trump’s acquiescence to the powerful gun lobby.
~ CIVIL RIGHTS
Donald Trump is expropriating state and local policing authority at an alarming pace. It’s all under the very thin guise of public safety, but what it really is is building his regime’s ability to quickly quell protest. He just recently declared the deployments—in Washington DC, Los Angeles and Chicago so far—are to quash “civil disturbances.”
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| PHOTO – David Swanson - Reuters |
No one doubts what that means. I and all freedom-loving Americans must now realize that, as we take to the streets, we’re putting our very lives on the line ! There will be casualties.
His infantile, Monopoly-game take on war
and diplomacy puts our military at great risk.
~ CONSUMER PROTECTION
Trump’s removal of Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and other consumer protection regulations, staffing and budgets will subject Americans once again to the very abuses those entities were established to rein in.
The halfwit’s consistent siding with corporate interests—including his own—over those of consumers will cost lives, from both the public health and product safety effects.
~ VETERANS AFFAIRS
Veterans of the U.S. military are committing suicide at an alarming rate of over 1,600 annually—that’s 17 deaths per day in the United States.*****
Trump—the confirmed draft-dodger—has consistently disparaged our county’s esteemed military veterans and their families.
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| PHOTO - @GovCox / X |
Adding to the insult, he continues to trivialize our national honor—not to mention putting our military at great risk—with his infantile, Monopoly-game take on war and diplomacy. Not to mention his obvious admiration of despots who are our country’s sworn enemies.
The cost of such contempt, such weakness? Still more lives.
~ HEALTH
Starting with Trump’s foolhardy cuts at CDC, NIH, NSF and other public health programs and agencies, his regime appears determined to address America’s public health crises as it has other challenges: if not by denial, then by voodoo medicine.
As elsewhere in his administration, Trump has jettisoned all public health experience, competence and reason in favor of rank hacks whose only qualification is loyalty—like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his Secretary of Health Human Services, an avowed anti-vaxer and conspiracy-theorist wacko.
Discrediting proven, life-saving vaccines; scuttling health and wellness initiatives; promoting unproven folk remedies; wholesale cuts to HIV/AIDS research and prevention funding; systematic dismantling of the nation’s capacity for dealing with the inevitable next pandemic…
While such reckless incompetence in confronting COVID alone killed hundreds of thousands, it’s no stretch to say the toll for the whole health-care calamity wrought by the Crimbecile on this and future generations could number in the millions.
A kind assessment would call him an amoral
hyper-capitalist; a less charitable one, a fascist.
~ POLITICS
Donald Trump is an insurrectionist, a traitor. He’s a bigot. A sexual predator. A pathological liar, manipulator and con man of the first order.
A kind assessment would rate him an amoral hyper-capitalist; a less charitable one, a fascist.
It’s not just his own values and behavior that are deadly. His entire political identity rests on validating his MAGA base’s worst instincts. While they elected him to be their hit man on immigrants, minorities, women, GLBTQ folks and the poor, they’re emboldened to be his assassins too.
The victims: the Capitol Police officers who died from injuries and later suicides stemming from the Trump-instigated Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection; the peaceful protesters mowed down in Charlottesville by a white-supremacist neo-Nazi; the 22 innocents shot and killed by an aggrieved anti-immigration terrorist in El Paso; Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota legislator, and her husband assassinated by a pro-Trump, anti-abortion political extremist.
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| PHOTO - Ryan M. Kelly, The Daily Progress |
Make no mistake, there will be more carnage from Trump’s implied consent of racist, anti-Democracy, neo-Nazi and religious-fanatic violence.
TIME WILL TELL
I’ll say it again. Calculating death tolls is hard, even for statisticians. So my wild reckonings here serve merely to account for general categories of causes and the rough scale of their effects.
What is not difficult to assess is the extent of the responsibility Donald J. Trump must bear for whatever those effects. His willful ignorance, his emotional retardation, his megalomania, are killing people…lots of people. And only future historians—if any are still allowed to tell the truth—will quantify the carnage.
* Michael Riordan – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - September 30, 2020
Lancet Commission on Public Policy - February 11, 2021
** Full List of Donald Trump Pardons During His Second Term - Newsweek - May 28, 2025
*** U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) website
**** “Gun Violence In America” - Everytown Research - November 7, 2024
***** Rand - May 22, 2025
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