In an interview published by Salon on Sunday, historian Timothy Snyder claimed that the death toll from the coronavirus crisis — nearly 220,000 — is the “achievement” that will define Donald Trump’s legacy.
“We talk about the pandemic as though it is a series of failures,” he said. “No, the pandemic is not a series of failures. It is the ‘achievement’ that Donald Trump is going to be most remembered for.”
“More than 200,000 people dead from the pandemic is a type of ‘achievement’ for Trump. It took real effort to make that happen,” he added.
Although Snyder argued that the Trump administration’s intention was not to kill this many people, he suggested that the current outcome is nevertheless the result of the president’s decisions.
Snyder claimed that one goal of Trump’s movement is to inflict as much pain as possible on others and said that history has shown that people can learn to both enjoy taking pain and imposing it on others. This dynamic, he said, defines Trump’s movement and must be understood by his Democratic opponents that seek to remove him from office.
“Donald Trump is evil. His movement is evil. They meet all the criteria for evil. Yet, there is a willful avoidance of using that language to describe him by the mainstream news media, political elites, and other opinion leaders and public voices,” he opined.
Trump previously disputed the U.S.’s COVID-19 fatality measurements. As reported by CTV News , the president denied Axios reporter Jonathan Swan’s claim that fatalities related to the virus were increasing at the time and claimed that America has the lowest data in various categories. To Trump’s dismay, Swan noted that the president was calculating the death rate as a proportion of cases as opposed to the population.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the case-fatality rate is not a valid measurement and made a clear distinction between the measure and mortality rate, which measures how likely it is for someone to die from the virus based on a given population. Conversely, the government agency said that the case-fatality measurement provides the likelihood of death after infection.
As The Inquisitr reported, Snyder has been openly critical of Trump outside his administration’s coronavirus response. He previously took aim at the head of state’s attacks on vote-by-mail and opined that the Republican is creating a crisis as part of a broader plan to cling to power. In particular, the historian said that the U.S. leader was attempting to blame his Democratic opponents for problems he was exacerbating.