More than 500,000 Americans have reportedly died from COVID-19, and one columnist wants them all buried at former President Donald Trump’s golf resort home in Florida.
Though more than 100,000 of those deaths occurred after President Joe Biden took office, Jason Sattler of USA Today thinks he deserves the blame for all of them.
“How can we honor the more than half-million Americans who lost their lives to COVID-19 while marking former President Donald Trump’s shameless failure to “preserve, protect and defend” this country and its Constitution?” he wrote this week. “Easy. Let’s bury the dead at Mar-a-Lago.”
Sattler says there is precedent for such a move.
“This small measure of justice would have an obvious historical precedent. Arlington, the former home of Robert E. Lee that is now Arlington National Cemetery, became a final resting place for Union soldiers in the spring 1864 — after 82,000 soldiers died in one month of fighting. Who could argue this wasn’t a just punishment? Lee had abandoned his post in the U.S. Army to lead the army of what Frederick Douglass called the ‘slaveholders’ rebellion.'”
Sattler claims Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, adding that “you cannot dissect the ex-president’s incitement against Congress, his vice president and our constitutional order from his monstrous approach to the pandemic.”
The writer says Trump “actively took steps that spread the virus, endangering millions” and adds that the former president is responsible for “costing one member of the Secret Service part of his leg.”
And Sattler points to comments Trump made in the early days of the pandemic, when not much was known about the coronavirus.
“Beginning in March, Trump silenced the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and continually offered rosy predictions that undermined caution, even as America was hitting a peak of deaths and cases that dwarfed the carnage the country experienced in April,” Sattler wrote.
Back in March, however, Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who served on Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force and is now President Biden’s chief medical adviser on COVID-19, said: “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”
“When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is,” the doctor said on CBS News.
A week before that, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had toured San Francisco’s Chinatown to send a message and said there’s no reason tourists or locals should be staying away from the area because of coronavirus concerns.
“That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here,” Pelosi said. “Come because precautions have been taken. The city is on top of the situation.”
Of course, the response to the virus has been evolving since then. Soon after Fauci made his comments, experts, including the CDC, said Americans should wear masks, citing estimates that 40% or more of those infected were asymptomatic but could still spread the virus.
Sattler concludes by saying Trump “enabled” the deaths from the pandemic.
“Families of COVID-19 victims who cannot afford a decent burial should be offered a chance for their loved ones to become permanent members of Mar-a-Lago, without paying the $200,000 membership fee Trump doubled when he ‘won’ the presidency. … We should bury as many of them as we can at Mar-a-Lago, until every foot of the property is occupied.”
“[A] revamped Mar-a-Lago filled with the literal reminders of the death Trump enabled and mocked would be a just monument to a monumental disaster of a presidency.”