One of my favorite expressions related to the power of voting is this: Elections have consequences. We know that there is a direct relationship between the moral, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual qualities of anyone that bear directly on his or her decisions and actions personally, but especially so while occupying any office of responsibility. The higher the personal attributes, the more enriching and rewarding will be the consequences of the decisions that follow. Conversely, if we elect candidates with very low personal qualities, we can expect very poor decisions and consequences to follow. Also, we know from experience that someone with high standards on each of those personal attributes will take responsibility for his or her actions, while those with very low standards will not.

I do not place blame on President Trump for the Covid-19 pandemic. Nor do I blame anyone else. There is no evidence that it was a human creation. Experts surmise that it began in the animal kingdom and was transferred to humans by natural processes. But how it has been analyzed, managed, and controlled as it impacts the lives, incomes, wealth and well-being of people is a different matter. Some nations have done an excellent job of controlling and reducing its effects; others have not. For example, the United States has a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, but we are experiencing more than 30 percent of the world’s death total. That data alone suggests that gross mismanagement of the pandemic is taking place here.

Acting wisely and timely require good judgment. During WWII, for example, General MacArthur showed his mental prowess by circumnavigating major battles with his unpredictable island-to-island strategy in the Pacific. He is credited with shortening the war in the Pacific while saving countless lives. Later, his surprise landing at Inchon during the Korean war saved a large number of American lives from an almost certain defeat at the Pusan Perimeter. Likewise, General Eisenhower made a series of decisions that shortened the war in Europe. His decisions about the time and date of the landing at Normandy in 1944 caught both General Rommel and Adolf Hitler by surprise. One year later the war in Europe ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender. He later gave us the Interstate Highway system, a warning about the military/industrial complex, and the strict requirement that all members of his cabinet reduce their daily reports to him to a single sheet of paper. Those of us who distrust and dislike voluminous reports understand the latter requirement. We did not elect MacArthur to high office, but we opened the Oval Office to Ike for 8 years. We owe both of them a continuing debt of gratitude.

Isolating causes and their consequences is not an easy task. An almost limitless number of events occur every second that arise from many preceding causal factors. Decisions about finding the linkages, and how to manage them invoke our four basic human qualities. Some decisions are so consequential they can have lasting effects today, tomorrow, and well into an indefinite future. There are no equations, no algorithms, and no amount of human intelligence that can isolate, sort, simplify, and link all of them in a coherent way. But science has an ingenious way of getting past a lot of the difficult interactions. We use the Latin term ceteris paribus (holding everything else constant) for such studies.

Columbia University’s professor of environmental health sciences, Jeffry Shaman, led an artful study in reducing the issues to just one of timeliness. Using an infectious-disease model, he and his investigators sought to answer this critical question: If all the actions taken by the Trump administration had been made one week earlier (holding everything else constant) how many deaths would have occurred? The answer: 36,000 fewer. And if only the timeline were moved two weeks earlier the number of deaths would have been reduced by 54,000. He made no conclusions about the methods themselves, only their impact on human lives. An excellent article in the Washington Post gives many more details. It is worth reading—in particular about the need to act swiftly and wisely when consequences are expanding exponentially.

Many issues that face any president are monumental in scope requiring someone with exceptional moral, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development. Donald Trump’s past shows us that was not, nor is he now qualified to lead this nation. At least 6 huge money injections from his father, 5 bankruptcies from the courts, and $950 million tax foregiveness from the IRS saved him in his real estate dealings. His questionable business practices, his private dealings, and his bellicose manner in which he cannot or will not take any responsibility for his failures could not be more apparent. Since taking office, he has told a minimum of 19,000 lies, showing all but the brain dead that he is a pathological liar. His economic and international policies all border on greed or insanity. His bills to Congress have taken excessively from the poor and the middle class while turning over massive amounts of wealth to the ultra-wealthy. His immigration policies show he has little empathy or compassion for minorities.

He cannot be a know-it-all, nor does anyone expect him to be. But he can be smart enough to surround himself with highly qualified persons so that jointly, they can act wisely and in the interests of people of good will. Donald Trump’s choices for his cabinet and for judges show that he wants only loyal ideologues around him or working for him. He mocks intelligence, compassion, and those who act with a moral compass. He has little regard for any others apart from his immediate family.

The extent of his actions and inactions could be made about their impact on the elderly, on veterans, or blacks, on Hispanics; or on the unemployed now at 40 million, a 25 percent unemployment rate, and the need to spend many trillions of dollars on trying to hold the economy together; and the additional deaths stemming from re-opening businesses too soon, But here is the tell-tale statement from President Trump, himself, that sums up his selfish attitude on all his activities, and his utter contempt for you and me:

From Vanity Fair, May 26, 2020. “As he headed into Memorial Day weekend, Donald Trump complained that he was COVID-19’s biggest victim. “He was just in a f**king rage,” said a person who spoke with Trump late last week. “He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!” Even as the death toll neared 100,000 and unemployment ranks swelled to over 38 million, Trump couldn’t see the pandemic as anything other than something that had happened to him. “The problem is he has no empathy,” the adviser said. Trump complained that he should have been warned about the virus sooner. [He was warned last November]. “The intelligence community let me down!” he said.”

Elections have consequences. Vote smart this coming November.