8/14/20
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, our case today is against the most powerful man in the world. And using the most powerful weapon of government by the people, you can hold this man accountable for the first time in his life, when you pass judgment on Nov. 3. We will show that President Trump has made a mockery of the Constitution, has lied to you more than 20,000 times and is currently trying to sabotage the Postal Service in a desperate bid to cling to power. But worse than any of that, he is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans during his willful mismanagement of the pandemic. The case against him is “open-and-shut,” as your prosecutor said Wednesday, and factually incontrovertible. That prosecutor, Senator Kamala Harris, is a woman who has spent most of her professional life going after criminals. Let the record show that she has already called him what he is. “I know predators, and we have a predator living in the White House,” she said last year. “The thing you must importantly know, predators are cowards.” So, to the case: Let’s begin with the loss of more than 165,000 lives from Covid-19 in the United States, on Trump’s watch, and maybe as many as 200,000.
You’ve already heard that the United States, with barely 4 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the coronavirus cases. And that the U.S. leads the world in total number of Covid-19 deaths, with a fatality rate five times as high as the global average. Remember that the next time the president praises himself. Trump owns this failure. We are a pariah nation, shunned and pitied, unable to travel outside our borders, prisoners of his fatal malfeasance. Some of you have excused this president’s incompetence, his quackery, his buffoonery, his vile character, his consistent insults of women, minorities, the free press, the courts — so long as it was just the daily respiration of a narcissist. But we know now, and you must never forget, that his ignorance is lethal. Most of you have made up your mind. For those who haven’t, the prosecutor will close with what she opened with. The United States is “in tatters.” Look around at the shuttered businesses, the hospitals stuffed with those struggling to breathe, Americans at each other’s throats. This president offers you no way out. You alone can show him the door.
