We need a truth commission to consider if Trump’s lies about COVID-19 are criminally negligent | Opinion
The Pan American Health Organization has made the chilling announcement: The number of COVID-19 deaths in the Americas has surpassed 1 million — nearly half of all pandemic deaths in the world. It makes me wonder whether former President Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Brazil, who consistently minimized the pandemic, should be held accountable for what could be considered criminal negligence.
What they have done by refusing to wear face masks and downplaying the pandemic during much of last year, long after the World Health Organization had publicly labeled COVID-19 a deadly disease, may have caused many preventable deaths.
Think about it: The Americas account for 10 percent of the world’s population, and for nearly 50 percent of the world’s COVID-19 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center figures.
It may not be a coincidence that the three countries with the most COVID-19 deaths in the world — the United States, Brazil and Mexico — were led by presidents who downplayed the pandemic.
What Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador did was political malpractice at best, criminal negligence at worse. They had been told by the world’s leading experts how deadly the disease was, but ignored their advice for political reasons.
As early as in February 2020, when the pandemic was just starting, Trump told journalist Bob Woodward in a taped interview that COVID-19 is “deadly stuff,” and that, “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.” Trump added that he decided to “play down” the pandemic so as not to scare people.
Trump’s main concern didn’t seem to be saving American lives, but preventing a stock-market collapse that would hurt his re-election chances in November.
For several months, Trump kept mocking those wearing face masks, saying, “We are turning the corner.” On Feb. 10, Trump said that it “looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
On April 17, more than month after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic, Trump tweeted “Liberate Michigan!,” telling his followers to resist the decision by the state’s Democratic governor to restrict public gatherings to stop the pandemic’s spread. By then, 38,000 Americans had died of COVID-19.
As late as on Sept. 21, Trump claimed that COVID-19 “affects virtually nobody.” When he left office on Jan. 20 this year, 400,000 Americans had died of the coronavirus, the most COVID-19 deaths in the world in absolute numbers.
Likewise, Lopez Obrador in Mexico minimized the pandemic from the start. He refused to wear face masks, said in March that Mexicans “should hug” without fear of contagion and claimed later that wearing religious amulets and not lying or stealing protected him from COVID-19.
In Brazil, Bolsonaro routinely mocked scientists’ recommendations to wear face masks and voiced skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines. Not surprisingly, the three skeptical amigos — Trump, Bolsonaro and Lopez Obrador — eventually got infected with the virus themselves.
Many legal scholars say it would be hard to successfully prosecute Trump for criminal negligence, defined by U.S. law as a gross or reckless disregard of human life resulting in serious injury or death. Prosecutors would have to prove a direct link between Trump’s words and a specific victim’s death, which would be hard to establish.
Other legal experts say that Trump could be liable to civil suits seeking money damages for his disastrous decisions, such as passing on key decisions to the states without federal help.
But I doubt any of this will work. Short of a congressional censure, what may be the best solution would be to create a bipartisan truth commission led by a widely respected figure to establish what went wrong and who was responsible. After all, many more Americans died of COVID-19 than were killed in World War II.
We don’t know how many of the more than 433,000 Americans lost to COVID-19 so far died because of political malpractice. But we owe it to them to make sure that no future president downplays a pandemic for political benefit.
Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show at 8 p.m. E.T. Sunday on CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera
This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 4:45 PM with the headline "We need a truth commission to consider if Trump’s lies about COVID-19 are criminally negligent | Opinion."