By the time Donald Trump is ejected from the White House, somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Americans will be dead due to an incompetent federal pandemic response. These deaths have been met with vigorous indifference from inside Trump's circle: Fill the government with sociopaths, the result will be sociopathy.
Though buried in each day's news cycle, the Trump administration has been going to some lengths to add at least five more deaths to the Trump era totals—and these ones are intentional. Trump Attorney General William Barr has filled the weeks between Trump's election loss and the inauguration of Joe Biden with a string of five federal executions, adding to the eight his department has already conducted since resuming execution of federal death row inmates in July. This is yet another breach of norms, as Joe Biden has asked that the federal death penalty be rescinded and in general outgoing administrations typically defer to incoming presidents on issues on which they have such visible public disagreements, but that hardly matters. What matters is that William Barr has worked diligently both to resume federal executions and to carry them out speedily and in the largest numbers possible.
The Trump administration, despite only starting in July, will leave office having executed the most federal prisoners since 1896. Barr has hinted that the number may yet increase.
In an Associated Press writeup of the scheduled executions, the first of which will happen on Thursday, Barr tries hard to pass off the executions with a business as usual or just following orders tone, and the AP takes his typically smarmy bullshit-peddling too much at face value. In practice, the resumption of federal executions is very much a William Barr affair. Barr was appointed to his current post in February 2019; Barr announced a resumption of executions in July, though it took nearly a year for the first to be carried out.
And Barr went farther, in pushing through (after Trump's loss) new federal rules allowing federal executions to be carried out by firing squad. The rule is, as far as we know, merely a symbolic one; the Biden administration will almost certainly reverse it. If Barr spent his last weeks in office pushing forward rules to bring back firing squads, it was because he decided to do so.
Even as a symbolic move, it shows Barr's priorities. From blocking Congress' investigative powers to the redemptive violence of executions, Barr has focused himself on making the nation a crasser, more corrupt, and more brutal one.
Trump himself has voiced approval for redemptive violence, whether against rally protesters or those he has determined in his own mind to be criminals, more than once. Barr was instrumental in the tear gassing of Washington, D.C. protesters, though he attempted to play that, too, off as only tangentially related to himself. This team has priorities.
Resuming federal executions, and in large enough numbers to challenge the post-Civil War era, is one of them. Combatting a worldwide pandemic is not.