The president of the United States has one job above all others. It is to keep Americans safe.
Trump failed last time around. He is failing again.
Whereas some U.S. leaders produce a list of accomplishments by which history can measure their terms, Trump is producing a death toll that will be the clearest metric of his leadership failures.
Not only is it already likely that the toll from Trump’s years in power will surpass that which occurred under any past POTUS but, given his disastrous choices with regard to public health, emergency preparedness, climate, guns and national security, his may be a record that is hard to beat.
And what is more, given that a U.S. president has a special stewardship role as the leader of the world’s richest and most powerful nation, the international death toll directly resulting from decisions taken on his watch is another crucial criterion by which Trump—and his enablers in Congress and on the Supreme Court—will be judged.
Once again, no American president in history will have been personally responsible for filling more graves worldwide than Trump.
During the administration of Woodrow Wilson, some 116,000 U.S. soldiers died during America’s involvement in World War I. That includes roughly 53,000 who perished in combat plus another 63,000 who died from accidents and disease, many during the influenza epidemic. The total deaths in the U.S. from that epidemic reached 675,000.
During World War II, more than 418,000 Americans died as a result of the conflict. 750,000 died during the Civil War.
It is believed that more than 450,000 Americans died of Covid-19 in 2020 while Trump was in office. With U.S. mortality rates 40 percent higher than the average of other OECD countries, it is estimated that due to Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic (lying about data, delaying testing, embracing pseudo science, ridiculing mask use) led to between 100,000 and 200,000 of those deaths.
By the end of the year after Trump had left office, meanwhile, over 800,000 Americans had died of Covid. How many of those deaths were due to the epidemiological effects of Trump policies? It is hard to say exactly. But the answer is clearly many.
While Trump could have capitalized on the success of the drive to find a vaccine that occurred while he was president, he has instead become associated with anti-vax views—and now policies, led by current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. (The United States this year has already recorded the most measles cases since declaring the disease eradicated in 2000.) And there’s more bad polices, bad science and Senator Joni Ernst’s “we’re all going to die” attitude that the GOP has made one of its signature slogans recently.
The administration’s signature initiative will result in as many as 17 million Americans losing their health care coverage. It is estimated that over 50,000 people a year could die unnecessarily as a result. Add to that the consequences of ending funding for medical research and the gutting of our diseases prevention capabilities and the toll will rapidly grow higher.
Trump’s relaxed environmental protections led to the deaths of over 20,000 people in 2019 alone according to an estimate from well-respected medical journal The Lancet. And Trump is now gutting more polices and actively inviting more poisoning of our environment.
We have already seen the tragic consequences of Trump’s cuts to our weather bureau with the horrendous loss of life in Texas this past week. How many died because of underfunding NOAA? (How many will die due to the proposed “wean[ing] off” of FEMA entirely?) Given projections for more weather disasters, the consequences are likely to be grim—measured in body bags and grieving families.
In 2024, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that Americans were experiencing a national health crisis due to gun violence. The almost 50,000 people who die each year in the U.S. is many times higher on a per capita basis than most other countries in the world. Our rate is seven times that of Canada, more than 300 times that of the United Kingdom and many many times higher than those in Asian countries like Singapore, Japan, South Korea and China.
So, do your own estimate. Do Trump and MAGA-backed gun policies like the new tax cuts for silencers in Trump’s signature legislation have a death toll? Tragically, yes. Our GOP-promoted gun disease is also fatal for many Americans.
It is not hard to conclude that, before Trump’s second term is up, the toll of his policies will exceed the worst of times for Americans. And we’re not the ones getting the worst of it. The Lancet just published another study asserting that 14 million people worldwide are likely to die in the next five years as a result of Trump cuts to USAID programs—including almost five million children.
The history of Trump’s time as president will be written in blood and tears.
While he will certainly also be seen as America’s most corrupt president and the one who did the most damage to our democracy, our basic freedoms and our standing in the world, his legacy for many of us and for tens of millions worldwide will be one of lost and shattered lives, a trail of wanton, indefensible carnage that, even a perfunctory look at available data indicts him as being comparable to some of history’s worst murderers.
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