Tag: Than

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A Provocative Claim About Presidential Responsibility

In a striking segment on MSNOW’s The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell argued that Donald Trump is the only American president whose peacetime policies have resulted in more deaths than those occurring under his wartime actions. The claim immediately ignited fierce debate. Supporters of Trump dismissed it as hyperbolic political theater, while critics said it merely put numbers to what they see as the lethal consequences of policy choices.

To be precise, the argument is not that Trump personally “killed” anyone, but that decisions made under his administration produced deadly outcomes. O’Donnell’s central focus was the sweeping DOGE cuts, which he contends slashed critical foreign aid programs and humanitarian assistance. According to the segment, those reductions led to food shortages and medical supply disruptions in vulnerable regions—particularly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa—contributing to starvation deaths, interruptions in HIV treatment, and preventable fatalities among infants and immunocompromised patients. The broader moral claim is straightforward: when the United States withdraws life-sustaining aid at scale, the consequences are measured in lives lost.

O’Donnell’s case draws added force from history. For decades, humanitarian aid to Africa enjoyed bipartisan backing. Republican President George W. Bush, for example, earned praise for expanding anti-HIV/AIDS initiatives that saved millions of lives. By that standard, O’Donnell suggests the Trump-era retrenchment marked not just a policy shift but a break from a rare area of cross-party moral consensus.

A related point, not specifically raised by O’Donnell but relevant to the broader debate, is that the United States continues to provide substantial aid to strategic allies such as Israel. That reality complicates a blanket “America First” defense of foreign aid reductions, since it suggests the issue is less about ending foreign assistance altogether and more about where and to whom it is directed.

Critics of O’Donnell’s assertion counter that it stretches causation beyond responsible limits. Foreign aid systems are complex, involving NGOs, host governments, and multilateral institutions; attributing downstream deaths directly to a single administration’s budget decisions can oversimplify reality. They also argue that every president makes trade-offs and that fiscal restraint, even when painful, is not equivalent to intent to harm. Some pro-Trump voices further contend that global poverty, corruption, and logistical failures—rather than U.S. policy alone—bear primary responsibility for humanitarian crises. From this vantage point, labeling Trump as uniquely deadly in peacetime risks politicizing tragedy.

Yet supporters of O’Donnell’s framing respond that intent is not the only moral metric—foreseeability matters. If experts warned that cutting HIV medication pipelines or food assistance would predictably result in deaths, and those warnings were ignored, responsibility cannot be shrugged off as indirect. They also fold in the administration’s handling of COVID-19, arguing that inconsistent messaging, resistance to mitigation strategies, and delayed responses contributed to avoidable American deaths. When those domestic losses are considered alongside alleged foreign aid consequences, the cumulative toll becomes central to the debate.

Ultimately, O’Donnell’s claim sounds bombastic at first hearing. Comparing peacetime and wartime death tolls is inherently fraught, and presidential accountability for global mortality is complex. Still, given the scale of reported COVID fatalities and credible estimates that reductions in humanitarian aid can translate into hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, it is not unreasonable to argue that Trump-era policies may have produced an extraordinary peacetime human cost. One can dispute the framing, question the arithmetic, and challenge the causation—but it is no longer far-fetched to make the claim.

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Is CJ Roberts The New Roger Taney?

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An interesting discussion unfolded on MSNOW’s All In with Chris Hayes in a segment that was initially intended to examine whether the courts have held up against the threat of authoritarianism posed by Trump 2.0. What emerged instead was a sobering assessment of the judiciary’s uneven performance—and a striking indictment of the Supreme Court’s role in enabling, rather than constraining, presidential power.

There was broad agreement among the panelists that the lower federal courts have largely done their job. District courts and federal appellate courts have repeatedly pushed back against Trump-era policies that stretch or outright exceed constitutional authority, issuing rulings that reflect a continued commitment to legal norms and institutional guardrails. In that sense, the judiciary below the Supreme Court was seen as functioning as a genuine check on executive overreach. That consensus, however, collapsed the moment the conversation turned to the nation’s highest court.

On the Supreme Court, the panel was unified in its criticism. Rather than reinforcing the limits imposed by the Constitution, the Court was described as an active enabler of the Trump administration, routinely undermining or reversing lower-court efforts to restrain him. The justices, in this telling, have not merely failed to defend democracy but have helped hollow it out, often by cloaking deeply political outcomes in the language of neutral legal principle.

The segment took a dramatic turn when NYU Law Professor Melissa Murray made a blunt and explosive claim: that Chief Justice John Roberts has now surpassed Roger Taney as the most damaging chief justice in American history. Taney, long regarded as the Court’s nadir, presided over the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which declared that Black Americans could not be citizens and helped propel the nation toward civil war. To suggest that Roberts belongs in the same conversation—let alone that he is worse—was a jarring assertion, and Murray did not soften it.

Professor Murray argued that Roberts has authored at least four opinions that she described as “the absolute most corrosive for democracy.” She pointed first to Rucho v. Common Cause, a decision that effectively blessed extreme partisan gerrymandering by declaring it a nonjusticiable political question. In doing so, the Court closed the federal courthouse doors to challenges against a practice that allows politicians to choose their voters, entrenching minority rule in state after state. She then cited Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act by striking down its preclearance formula, a move that unleashed a wave of voter suppression laws across the country almost immediately. Murray also pointed to Trump v. United States, the presidential immunity case, which dramatically expanded the scope of executive immunity and signaled that a president may be functionally above the law when acting under the guise of official duties.

Although she did not explicitly name a fourth decision, the implication was hard to miss. Citizens United looms over any discussion of democratic corrosion, having opened the floodgates to unlimited, often opaque political spending and accelerating the transformation of American democracy into something approaching oligarchy. Taken together, these rulings form a throughline in which democratic participation is narrowed, accountability is weakened, and power is consolidated in the hands of the few—all under the stewardship of a chief justice who has repeatedly claimed to care deeply about the Court’s legitimacy.

Whether the argument that “Roberts is worse than Taney” gains wider traction remains to be seen, but it is crucial to note that Professor Murray is far from alone in making it. Legal scholars and commentators have increasingly drawn parallels between Taney’s Court, which entrenched slavery and inequality, and a modern Court that has systematically undermined voting rights, empowered unchecked executive authority, and normalized vast concentrations of political power. What made the moment on All In so striking was not just the severity of the claim, but the growing sense that it no longer sounds fringe. Instead, it reflects a mounting recognition that the greatest threats to American democracy may now be coming not from lawless actors outside the system, but from those entrusted to interpret and preserve it.