Few were surprised to learn the 22-year old shooter at the Colorado Springs nightclub who killed five people and injured 25 last week was from a staunchly pro-Donald Trump community. His grandfather Randy Voepel is a Republican member of California’s state assembly, a vocal MAGA supporter and a defender of the 6 January 2021 insurrection.
We know from multiple American court cases that many violent acts since 2015 have been directly inspired by Trump’s rhetoric. But how many?
As Trump gears up his campaign to return as US president, we can calculate the number of Americans who have died needlessly since his first announced run in mid-2015.
The number is 548,800, more than half a million.
Surge in bloodshed
All categories of violence have soared in the USA since 2015, after at least two decades of steady decline. From 2015 to 2021, total firearm homicides jumped 55%. Mass shootings have increased 106% since 2015, and FBI hate crimes have soared 175%.
Violent assault incidents overall crept up slightly in 2016 and 17, then accelerated in Trump’s last two years. Total assaults increased 124% between 2015 and 2021. Police shot on duty rose 58% from 279 in 2015 to 441 last year. See green chart, above.
The Turnbull thesis
How do we explain the escalation in all categories of violence since 2015, only in the USA? (Homicides in Australia, for example, declined from 16.0 per million in 2000 to 12.3 in 2005 and down further to 10.2 in 2020, the latest data.)
There is one explanation, and only one. In mid 2015, Donald Trump began his push for power with malicious lies and routine calls for physical violence against opponents.
More than thirty calls for direct physical assault are now on the record. All these were amplified by Fox News, the media outlet which became Trump’s principal conduit to his violent army from 2015 until recently.
Among observers who attribute the surge in violence to this unwritten pact between Trump and Fox News, is former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Turnbull responded on American radio recently to a question about Fox News:
“Americans are seeing their democracy trashed, and it is being trashed in large part by right wing media ... the biggest challenge to the United States is not Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. It's the animosity, the division, the anti-democratic movements within the United States itself.”
The toll of violence
Our best estimate of the shooting deaths attributable to the surge in hatred and division Trump and Fox News have provoked is 24,400. That is based on excess fatalities above the 2015 level, making the generous assumption that they would have plateaued absent Trump. The toll due to other violent attacks we estimate at 3,800 using the same methodology.
Suicides
Suicides nationwide increased from 131 per million population in 2015 to 134 in 2016. That was almost 45,000 deaths. They then surged in 2017 and 2018, before subsiding slightly in 2019.
Our calculations of the extra suicides in the years 2016 to 2021 attributable to the social and economic dislocation caused by Trump’s policies and/or rhetoric, including farmers, is 13,700.
Homelessness, poverty, exposure
Homelessness increased steadily through the Trump period after years of marked decline. Preventable deaths due to malnutrition, illness and exposure attributable to policy decisions which worsened poverty come to 4,800.
Covid deaths
The Trump administration mismanaged the pandemic disastrously, costing at least 502,100 lives lost unnecessarily.
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This is an abbreviated version of an article published today in Independent Australia. The original article, with more data relating to the calculations, is available here in full for free:
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/half-a-million-needless-deaths-under-trumps-regime-of-anger-fear-and-hate,17014
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