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Brutality and deaths surge as the increasingly erratic Donald Trump provokes racist anger and hatred [1]
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Date: 2025-06-16
The world has watched appalled in recent days as preventable deaths and injuries have escalated in the USA.
Former Democrat speaker of the Minnesota house of representatives Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed last Saturday at their in Brooklyn Park home in another politically motivated assassination.
State senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot multiple times by the same gunman at their Minnesota home, but miraculously survived. 156 mass shootings have occurred this year.
Police shot a man suspected of stealing a car in Carlisle, Arkansas, last Thursday. Americans shot and killed by police now number 650, and those injured 436.
Californian Senator Alex Padilla was dragged to the floor and handcuffed by Trump’s thugs in Los Angeles on Thursday when trying to question homeland security secretary Kristi Noem in a press conference.
A few days earlier, an Australian TV reporter was deliberately shot in the leg with a rubber bullet while speaking to camera near an anti-Trump demonstration she was covering. Fortunately Padilla and the reporter suffered only bruises.
One soldier was killed and another injured during exercises in advance of Trump’s farcical birthday military display last Saturday.
Multiple causes of death escalate under Trump
Observers of American brutality anticipate deaths and injuries will accelerate as Trump resumes calls to his personal followers and his goons in the military and civil forces to attack perceived opponents physically.
Last Tuesday he promised violence against citizens protesting last Saturday’s vanity army parade:
"If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force.”
Other MAGA figures are echoing Trump’s calls for immediate killings. A senior law officer in Florida accompanied by Florida’s Attorney General announced on Friday that his officers would immediately kill anyone seen throwing a projectile, without arrest or trial:
“We will kill you graveyard dead. We’re not going to play.”
These fears of violence are based on the well-documented surges in multiple categories of killings in Trump’s first term. These included:
hate crimes
homicides
farmer suicides following loss of markets
maternal deaths from pregnancy complications
starvation and malnutrition
obesity and malnutrition
exposure and hypothermia
smoking, drug addiction and alcohol abuse
deaths in custody
fatalities during political protests
Like many current and former wannabe dictators, Donald Trump appears to take personal delight in ordering the deaths of people he is authorised to kill.
An underreported fact from Trump’s first term is his instructions to execute more than four times the number of death row prisoners ordered killed by former presidents in the previous sixty years.
On day one of his second term he expanded the federal death penalty so he can order even more Americans executed. He has already resumed killing death row prisoners in his second term.
The toll of needless deaths in Trump’s first term, including preventable Covid fatalities, has been estimated at around 780,000. That is the number of Americans who would still be with us today had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election instead of Trump.
Sudden rise in white hate crimes
As reported here since 2020, hate crimes inspired by Trump have surged ever since he announced his run for president in 2015 with direct urgings to his followers to deploy violence.
These look set to remain at around double the pre-Trump levels for the foreseeable future. See chart below:
Hate crimes by white offenders peaked in 2023 at 5,906, an increase of 122.2% over the pre-Trump low of 2,658 in 2015. The decline in 2024 was just 2.7%, according to Phys.org.
Other categories of violence with similar chart trajectories include:
personal assaults
firearm murders and manslaughters
children and teenagers shot
school shootings
random mass shootings
murders and manslaughters by means other than guns
suspects killed by police
World Bank confirms Trump’s regimes cost multiple lives
The World Bank confirmed in last week’s data release that the decline in life expectancy during the first Trump administration was the second worse in the developed world. From 78.7 years in 2015, US life expectancy tumbled to 76.3 in 2021. Only Mexico suffered a worse setback.
This recovered during the Biden administration, to 77.4 in 2022 and 78.4 in 2023.
Ranking on life expectancy among OECD nations has slipped from 28th through most of the Obama years to 30th by the end of Trump’s first term. It ranked 31st in the latest dataset. See chart below:
Substantial advances in life expectancy were made in 2023 by Chile, Costa Rica, Poland, Colombia, Mexico, Slovak Republic and New Zealand, all adding more than a year to the 2022 number.
The only country with a significant decline was Turkiye, which slipped from 77.59 years to 77.16.
If history repeats, which appears to be happening so far this year, Americans can expect their life expectancy to decline substantially over the next three years. This will impact especially those perceived by Trump’s deranged disciples to be his opponents.
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This is an edited version of an article published today in Independent Australia. The original article is available here in full for free:
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/brutality-and-deaths-surge-again-as-trump-provokes-racist-hatred,19835
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