Pundits stir up anger after comparing 9/11 and coronavirus death tolls

“Tomorrow — 9/11/20 — is the 19th anniversary of the worst day in memory, a day on which 3,000 innocent Americans died needlessly. But Donald J. Trump is directly responsible for at least FORTY TIMES that many avoidable deaths from Covid-19. It’s the biggest crime of our lives,” Harvard professor Laurence Tribe tweeted on Thursday.

One person called Tribe’s tweet “unhinged lunacy.”

“Through Incompetence on Covid-19 Trump has single handedly caused the equivalent of 67 9/11 level deaths,” wrote Malcolm Nance, a former naval intelligence officer and regular guest on MSNBC. “There must be outrage over his death toll.”

Lincoln Project co-founder Ron Steslow made a similar point.

“Every day @realDonaldTrump remains President is equivalent to one of the WTC towers falling on 9/11,” he tweeted. That tweet has since been deleted. One user called it “enraging and depressing.”

“COVID-19 has the death toll of 9/11 happening *63* times. The CDC is 1.5% of the defense budget,” said a tweet from Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman started to trend on Twitter for a thread he posted about 9/11.

“So it’s 9/11. Hard to remember now how large the terrorist attack loomed in our national psyche; after all, in death toll Covid-19 is already the equivalent of 60 9/11s,” the economist wrote.

“Can we just give the family members of 9/11 our time today?” someone responded. “It’s so disrespectful to try to draw parallels to COVID, even more so today. Just stop.”

Some said that comparing the two tragedies is unproductive.

“I’ll never forget where I was on 9/11. I remember feeling absolutely immobile with shock and fear. You don’t have to use this day as a [political] jab at trump or compare the amount of deaths to the coronavirus. It’s pointless. Just remember how we, left & right, all came together,” wrote actor Devon Sawa.

Journalist Michael Tracey said that comparing the coronavirus death toll to that of U.S. wars or 9/11 is “not useful,” in part because it “raises big philosophical questions about the two categories of death, and to what extent they’re comparable. IMO, sending a 20-year-old to die in an unjust war is a far bigger tragedy than a 80-year-old dying from a naturally-occurring virus.”

He added: “Doesn’t mean the 80-year-old’s death is NOT tragic — it is — just that they’re different categories of death with different moral [contexts].”

Another person commented on Twitter: “Not sure why so many liberals think it’s some kind of clever ‘gotcha’ to compare covid deaths to 9/11 deaths. We don’t memorialize the people that died from swine flu or ebola but keep making false equivalencies for internet points I guess.”