One of the more ludicrous things we heard as a justification to vote for Donald Trump was that Trump would run the government “like a business,” as if this is, in and of itself, an obvious good thing. Yet we have come to learn that Trump has run the government just exactly like he ran his businesses. Trump broke it, bankrupted it, stripped it for parts, hid away the profits, and left bodies in the ruble.

The same people who believe in running government like a business must believe there are some limits to the idea. Because if Trump actually ran a business that did what the government is doing now, criminal charges would have already been filed. Many people don’t realize that companies themselves and the executives of companies can be prosecuted for crimes. Possible criminal liability is just one of the reasons you don’t see any Boeing 737 Max’s flying over your head right now. (There are many reasons, admittedly). A company whose business is so reckless that it causes people to die will be prosecuted.

Up to this point, anyone calling to prosecute Trump for how he’s handled COVID has been deemed radical. But with the publication of the Vanity Fair article, which stated that Trump and Kushner were ready to let COVID go as a “Blue State” issue when it was killing brown people and impugning Democratic governors, and that it wasn’t until COVID started killing the “wrong people” that COVID got Trump’s attention, now it seems “radical” to not talk about criminal prosecution.

In a Washington Monthly column, David Atkins argues that Trump and Jared Kushner should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. In our minds, this is overstated. Crimes against humanity should require a clear intent to kill innocents. But the argument is still persuasive:

But there’s another option: “genocide.” The known racial bias of the deaths overlaps with the political bias–black and brown Americans tend to be Democrats and live in Democratic areas, and are disproportionately falling victim to the virus–which in turn would make “genocide” the most compelling way to describe what Trump and Kushner have done.

Genocide. Yes, it sounds preposterous. It sounds like the hyperbole of the deeply unserious. But what else can you call it? No word is perfect, but the crime must have a name that fits the enormous scope of its evil. It must describe what actually happened. And what happened is that the president and his son-in-law deliberately allowed 150,000 (and counting) Americans to die of a pandemic, because it would mostly kill off their political opponents. Because it would kill off mostly poor people of color. Because they thought they could gain an upper hand by blaming opposing governors. But they thought it would advantage them politically. It’s like a plot out of a bad action movie with a comic book villain, except it’s real life and those villains are still governing and making decisions.

We have a better term, reckless homicide. The use of the word “genocide” here cheapens real genocide, in our view. Which isn’t to say that what Trump and Kushner have done doesn’t deserve prison time – it does. Let’s just get the nomenclature correct. Reckless homicide – deaths due to reckless indifference to human life, akin to second degree manslaughter, or about where a corporate executive who signed off on what he or she knew to be a highly unsafe plane, would get, if it were proven.

But at least the conversation has started. It needs to. Though our focus should be on removing Trump, there should also be some thought on what to do once he is removed from office to prevent this from ever happening again.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom