The Trump administration deliberately harnessed racism and class animosity to push policies that caused hundreds of thousands of US deaths, according to a scathing new report in the British medical journal The Lancet.
Here's the primary research itself, which is free to download:
Woolhandler S, Himmelstein DU, Ahmed S, Bailey Z, Bassett MT, Bird M, et al. Public policy and health in the Trump era. The Lancet. 2021 Feb;S0140673620325459. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/fulltext
The authors essentially make three arguments:
Neoliberal policies had been damaging US public health since long before Trump's election.
Trump hugely accelerated these policies and did significant damage to US health and well-being on virtually every available metric.
President Biden must not only reverse Trump's actions, but go further and reverse the damage done by decades of neoliberalism.
This is the opening paragraph of the executive summary (it's a long paper):
This report by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era assesses the repercussions of President Donald Trump's health-related policies and examines the failures and social schisms that enabled his election. Trump exploited low and middle-income white people's anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health. His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. He chose judges for US courts who are dismissive of affirmative action and reproductive, labour, civil, and voting rights; ordered the mass detention of immigrants in hazardous conditions; and promulgated regulations that reduce access to abortion and contraception in the USA and globally. Although his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed, he weakened its coverage and increased the number of uninsured people by 2.3 million, even before the mass dislocation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has accelerated the privatisation of government health programmes. Trump's hostility to environmental regulations has already worsened pollution—resulting in more than 22,000 extra deaths in 2019 alone—hastened global warming, and despoiled national monuments and lands sacred to Native people. Disdain for science and cuts to global health programmes and public health agencies have impeded the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and imperil advances against HIV and other diseases. And Trump's bellicose trade, defence, and foreign policies have led to economic disruption and threaten an upswing in armed conflict.
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