To The Editor:

I didn’t believe I’d have to write anything this grim. I never imagined I’d have to accuse an American presidential administration of criminally negligent homicide, but that’s where we are. The Boston Globe editorialaccusing Donald Trump of having “blood on his hands” was right on the mark. He does indeed, and so do all of his corrupt enablers, both in our government and in our badly misnamed “conservative media.” Every lie and piece of disinformation that these people spew into our public discourse drips with the blood of its innocent victims.

To be clear, I don’t accuse Mad King Donald of causing the virus. He didn’t, nor did anyone else. I accuse Trump and his authoritarian cronies around the world of bungling their response to the virus, thereby changing a containable viral outbreak into a worldwide pandemic of historic proportions. The world’s democratic governments responded to the crisis in many ways, ranging from excellent in Germany and South Korea, to satisfactory in Japan, to poor in Italy. But the response of authoritarian governments everywhere has been uniformly disastrous, and that has allowed what was once a manageable virus to spread like wildfire around the globe.        

In China, Russia, Brazil, North Korea, Hungary, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, the United States or any other of Trump’s favorite autocracies, the response has been the same – lie, deny, defy and blame the other guy. The world’s authoritarian leaders denied they had a problem until they couldn’t deny it any longer. When they finally admitted that people were dying in droves, they switched to self-glorifying propaganda, blaming other people for the problem while congratulating themselves for doing a great job.

China pretended its epidemic was under control until it suddenly announced cases by the thousands. Putin pretended Russia had 638 cases; one day later, it had over 112,000 cases. North Korea still pretends to have no cases at all. The list of lies Mad King Donald told about COVID-19 for a month, fills up two pages online.  Look them up.

Had the world’s autocrats dealt with this epidemic honestly from the outset rather than lying and downplaying its severity, it never could have become the catastrophe of our lifetimes. They all have blood on their hands – buckets of blood. So let’s call this pandemic what it really is: The Authoritarian Plague.

Rev. Robert Plaisted    

Bath