Voters who believed that Donald Trump cared about them should have asked themselves: “Does he care about my children?” 

And the answer would have been: “No.”

The father of modern political science, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) is widely thought of as the personification of Satan.        

Actually, Machiavelli was a passionate republican, who spent most of his life in the service of his beloved city-state, Florence.

Niccolo Machiavelli

In his masterwork, The Discourses, he warned that life is complex and no course of action is guaranteed safe or successful.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a man of simplistic “solutions” for simplistic audiences.

By early April, 2020, he had refused to issue a national “stay-at-home” order to contain the spread of the Coronavirus. When states began issuing shutdown orders of their own, he railed against those orders and demanded that “we need to reopen the country.” 

Donald Trump

What lay behind this demand were two hidden agendas. He wanted to:

• Quickly revitalize—and take credit for—a once-booming economy, even though this was largely created by President Barack Obama.
• Return to his Nuremberg-style rallies, where he could slander anyone he wanted while basking in the worship of thousands of his fanatical followers.

Which is why he clearly missed this warning Machiavelli offered in The Discourses:  

“…I shall speak here only of those dangers to which those expose themselves who counsel a republic or a prince to undertake some grave and important enterprise in such a manner as to take upon themselves all the responsibility of the same.  

“For as men only judge of matters by the result, all the blame of failure is charged upon him who first advised it, while in case of success he receives commendations. But the reward never equals the punishment….

“I see no other course than to take things moderately, and not to undertake to advocate any enterprise with too much zeal, but to give one’s advice calmly and modestly. 

“If either then the republic or the prince decides to follow it, they may do so, as it were, of their own will, and not as though they were drawn into it by your importunity.

“In adopting this course it is not reasonable to suppose that either the prince or republic will manifest any ill will towards you on account of a resolution not taken contrary to the wishes of the many.”

But, by May, 2020, more Americans were wary about “reopening the country” than about rushing to do so. 

On the May 15, edition of The PBS Newshour, New York Times columnist David Brooks noted:

“If you look at actual behavior, people locked themselves down before any politician took a move. And even in those states where the politicians are opening up, people are still locking down….

“And so I think the key decisions right now are not being made in statehouses and certainly not the White House. They’re being made in living rooms, as people decide, is it safe? Can I go out?”

Coronavirus

By pushing his mantra—“America needs to reopen NOW!”—Trump was risking the lives of millions of Americans. But he was also risking the future of his Presidency.

If “reopening” the country proved disastrous, he had no back-up plan to offer.

Several states—such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—that re-opened saw swarms of people flooding into bars and restaurants. They didn’t wear masks or practice “social distancing.” Packed together like sardines, they offered themselves like a Right-wing sacrifice to Coronavirus.

The results were inevitable.

A new wave of COVID-19 erupted after America “reopened.” More employees were laid off—or refused to come to work for fear of Coronavirus.

The economy continued to tank.

As summer neared its end and millions of students faced returning to school, Trump offered his next “solution” to the Coronavirus pandemic: Send them back to school—-and not through virtual classes at home.

Trump wanted children to return to possibly COVID-19-infected classrooms. 

And he wasn’t asking parents to send their children back to school. He was ordering them to.

On July 8, 2020, he tweeted that he might withhold federal funding from schools that did not resume in-person classes that fall.   

Why was he so insistent on this? 

Trump knew that before parents could return to work, their kids needed to return to class, He hoped that would boost the economy—for which he could take credit.

And that would boost his chances for re-election in November. 

Just as the ancient Canaanites sacrificed their children to the god Moloch, so Trump expected his followers—and opponents—to risk their children’s lives for him.

Ancient Canaanites offering their children as sacrifices to Moloch

And the sacrifices quickly started coming. Approximately 2.1 million children in the United States tested positive for COVID-19 by the end of December 2020.

Those who supported Trump in 2020 clearly valued the lives of their children far less than putting a ruthless psychopath back into power.   

And, in 2024, 77 million Americans forgave him the loss—or near-loss—of their children and sent him back to the White House.