The once venerable UK-based Lancet medical journal has published a scathing diatribe against the Trump presidency, accusing him of racism, xenophobia, and bigotry.
“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,” the left-wing magazine asserts.
Alleging to evaluate “the repercussions of President Donald Trump’s health-related policies” while examining “the failures and social schisms that enabled his election,” the Lancet finds nothing positive about Mr. Trump or the people who voted for him.
Trump’s “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,” the Lancet declares in its February 10 report.
The Lancet also finds fault with Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court, highlighting their less than full-throated support for abortion-on-demand in the United States.
“He chose judges for US courts who are dismissive of affirmative action and reproductive, labour, civil, and voting rights,” its states, “ordered the mass detention of immigrants in hazardous conditions; and promulgated regulations that reduce access to abortion and contraception in the USA and globally.”
The Lancet also takes issue with Trump’s environmental measures, making the incredible claim that he was responsible for 22,000 environmentally related deaths.
“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,” the journal claims.
Curiously, the Lancet labels Trump’s trade, defense, and foreign policies as “bellicose,” despite the fact that he is the only president in recent history not to have engaged the U.S. military in armed conflicts.
Trump’s actions were “singularly damaging,” the journal declares, yet “many of them represent an aggressive acceleration of neoliberal policies that date back 40 years.”
At the end of its executive summary, the Lancet’s Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era pivots away from its rant against Trump to offer praise for President Biden.
“The Commission applauds President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for rejoining WHO and the Paris Climate Agreement, and for other steps they have taken to rescind some of President Trump’s health-harming executive actions,” the Lancet declares.
Now the new administration and Congress must “initiate thoroughgoing reforms to reverse widening economic inequality and the neoliberal policy drift that pre-dated Trump, and redress long-standing racism — root problems that harm health and have fomented threats to US democracy,” it states.
“Censure of Trump’s virulent brand of racism is imperative but insufficient,” the Lancet warns. “US leaders must embrace emphatically anti-racist politics and programmes to dismantle the centuries-old structures that reproduce racial inequity in health and all other spheres.”
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