The USA continues to suffer from the epidemic of killings and maimings which began in 2015 when Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy with urgings to personal violence. Those calls, which keep on coming, are spread and amplified by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.
Total gun homicides reported by Gun Violence Archive to the end of June this year were 8,483, which is on track for an annual tally of 16,966. Total homicides are, of course, much higher.
While this continues the decline from the 2021 peak, it remains well above the pre-Trump levels. See green chart below.
Donald Trump the accelerant
The trajectory in the green chart – steady decline from the 1980s to 2015, then a surge to 2021, then another decline – is evident in almost all categories of violence. These include
* personal assaults
* hate crimes
* gun murders and manslaughters
* school shootings
* children and teenagers shot
* random mass shootings
* police officers shot on duty.
This Trump-fuelled violence is reflected in the life expectancy data, which shows a sharp drop in 2015 continuing into 2016. See purple chart at the top.
The slump from 2015 to 2019 was almost certainly exacerbated by the escalation in political killings, although this is impossible to prove definitively from the limited data available.
Donald Trump has urged physical violence since announcing his candidacy in 2015
There is no other plausible explanation. The surge in violence from late 2015 onwards and the decline in life expectancy did not happen anywhere else. The USA is the only advanced nation whose peak longevity was back in 2014, the year before Trump’s first calls for retribution. It is the only OECD member to have recorded lower life expectancy in 2016 than in 2010.
Longevity improved in 2018 and 2019, then plummeted in 2020 and 2021 as a consequence of the Trump administration’s fatal mismanagement of the pandemic. The recovery in 2022 has been only partial, due to lingering Covid infections and the continuing murders and manslaughters.
Latest data is depressing reading
The World Bank has just released its annual life expectancy data for 217 countries for 2022. The world average was 72.0 years, down from 72.3 back in 2016 and well below the all-time high 73.0 in 2019. It was a substantial improvement, however, on 71.3 in 2021.
Two phenomena have shortened productive lives recently – the Covid pandemic and the violence fomented in the USA by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
Regional impact of Covid patchy
Life expectancy in East Asia and the Pacific fell only 4.8 months from 2019 to 2021 as a result of the Covid pandemic. The decline in Europe and Central Asia, in contrast, was 27.8 months. Latin America and the Caribbean was the worst hit region with lives shortened by an average 34.7 months – nearly three years.
Leading the developed members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for longevity in 2022 was Japan, with 84.0 years. That is actually Japan’s lowest number since 2016 and well below its peak of 84.6 in 2020. So the Japanese are recovering from Covid steadily – but slowly. Switzerland came next with 83.5 years, closely followed by Australia with 83.2. See blue chart below.
The USA ranked 30th with 77.4 years, down from 22nd at the turn of the century and 27th in 2014, pre-Trump.
Change over time
Some countries currently placed well down the current rankings are in fact improving their life expectancy dramatically. Turkiye, for example, while ranking a lowly 28th in 2022 has zoomed up from 33rd just two years earlier.
Other developed nations to have extended average life spans impressively are South Korea, Portugal and Ireland. Countries liberated from the Eastern European communist blocs have also improved. These include Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary. See yellow chart below.
At the other end of the chart, four developed countries had lower life expectancy in 2022 than in 2010, all of them in the Americas. The most prominent failures – the USA, Costa Rica and Colombia – have high firearm fatalities, serious drug usage problems and all badly mismanaged the Covid crisis.
Americans can vote to end the MAGA madness killing so many of them in November this year — if they live that long.
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This is an edited version of an article published today in Independent Australia, available in full here for free:
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/life-expectancy-data-reaffirms-the-horrors-of-a-trump-presidency,18748