Sanders claims mass deaths if GOP policies enacted.
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Paul Krugman, the prolific liberal economist and Nobel Prize recipient, left The New York Times at the end of 2024 because, he said, the editorial constraints placed on his columns had become "extremely intrusive" and "intolerable." He writes now for his own eponymous Substack, where he is free of such constraints and can express his views exactly as he wishes.
So it was in his own true voice that Krugman recently commented on President Trump's hostility toward the so-called "deep state" and the new administration's restrictions on federal employees. "Donald Trump Wants You to Die," his Jan. 24 essay was headlined. He predicted that under Trump, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies will be "emasculated and politicized" and "banned from making policy recommendations that are inconvenient for Trump. … And many Americans will die as a result."
Around the same time as Krugman's piece was published on Substack, an article in The Appeal, a left-of-center news site that covers the criminal justice system, appeared under an equally dire headline: "'People Will Die' from Trump's Trans Prisoner Crackdown, Experts Warn." Over at Indivisible, another progressive website, Trump's short-lived order to freeze spending on federal loans and grants was described not only as a "dictatorial power grab" but as "chaos that will kill" and "a death sentence for millions of Americans."
I have long been struck by the popularity of such arguments on the left.
After Massachusetts voted 30 years ago to ban rent control statewide, a group of doctors in Cambridge issued a statement, duly covered in the Globe, which pronounced the new policy fatal to human beings.
"If rent control vanishes, dozens will die," the group's spokesperson declared. "One-third of our heart attack patients at Cambridge Hospital live in rent-controlled apartments. By allowing landlords to force them out, the governor and state Legislature are implementing the death penalty — a social policy sure to kill."
Once I started looking, I kept spotting examples of liberals playing the death card. There was the prominent Massachusetts welfare lobbyist, for example, who warned that if a 4 percent trim in the state budget were approved, "people will be dying in hidden corners all over the state. … They may die slowly, but they will die." There was the 1990 forecast by then-governor Michael Dukakis that without a tax increase, the Grim Reaper would stalk Massachusetts: "I think we will probably lose some citizens of the Commonwealth because we can't do justice by them."
The phenomenon isn't restricted to the Bay State.
When Joe Biden was vice president, The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler took him to task in his Fact Checker column for making the "absurd" claim that "more people will be murdered or raped" if a jobs bill being pushed by the Obama administration weren't passed.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Jonathan Alter, a well-known liberal pundit, argued that electing Mitt Romney would cost lives. "We're not calling Mitt Romney a murderer," Alter explained. "What we are saying is that if he's elected president, a lot of people will die."
When Trump, early in his first term, signed an order banning travel to the United States for 90 days from seven Muslim-majority countries, the American Civil Liberties Union dialed the death talk up to 11. "We must face this simple truth: Because of this executive order, many innocent people will die," the West Virginia director of the ACLU intoned.
At times it seemed as if liberals thought pretty much everything proposed by Trump or Republicans would leave the streets strewn with corpses.
Tax relief, for instance.
"How Many People Will Die for Each Rich American's Trumpcare Tax Cut?" a HuffPost article demanded. On social media, Senator Bernie Sanders raged: "Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks."
Proposals to reform the Affordable Care Act triggered equally unhinged rhetoric.
"The GOP plan for Obamacare could kill more people each year than gun homicides," screeched a headline on Vox. The New Republic joined in: If adopted, the legislation "would directly kill about 200,000 people over the next decade," it forecast in a story headlined: "Trumpcare Will Kill People. Why Is That So Hard to Accept?" Senator Elizabeth Warren agreed, of course. "People will die," she said on the Senate floor. "Let's be very clear: Senate Republicans are paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with American lives."
Examples could be multiplied endlessly. Confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would kill people. Returning Trump to the White House would kill people. Even electing conservatives to state office would kill people.
To be fair, conservatives have been known to do the same thing.
It was a Republican, the late senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who told senior citizens in 2009 that if the Affordable Care Act passed, "you're going to die soon." It was Representative Michele Bachmann, another Republican, who railed on the House floor that Obamacare "literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens." It was Sarah Palin, a former GOP governor and vice presidential nominee, who claimed that Democrats were pushing legislation under which the sick and the elderly would have to stand before a government "death panel" and have bureaucrats decide if they live or die.
In recent years, Republican rhetoric on immigration and border issues has amplified the accusation that the Biden administration's policies led to a migrant murder spree. During campaign rallies last fall, Trump contended that the White House had admitted more than 13,000 convicted murderers, who were roaming the country. "These are stone-cold killers, and they let in people that are worse than any criminal we have." The spreading willingness on the right to engage in over-the-top "people will die" talk is one of the most disheartening ways in which the MAGA movement has perverted conservative discourse.
Much more often than not, however, it is pundits and politicos on the left who are quickest to play the death card. That reflects the attitude, long prevalent among progressives, that anyone who disagrees with their prescriptions is not just wrong but evil — someone to recoil from, not to reason with; not to debate but to damn.
"If your policies are adopted, people will die" is worse than hyperbole. It is a kind of intellectual blackmail. If you abolish rent control, people will die. If you cut taxes, people will die. If you confirm a conservative justice, people will die. If you modify Obamacare, people will die. If you don't seal the border, people will die. With rare exceptions, anyone who resorts to such language isn't trying to engage in debate; they are trying to shut off debate by invoking the ultimate moral trump card.
In a democracy, persuasion ought to matter more than panic. When politicians — or Nobel laureates, for that matter — think the way to win a policy debate is to claim their opponents are murderers, it's a good indication their position isn't as strong as they think.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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