Former Republican presidential candidate and Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain died this morning according to his staff.
Cain had spent the past month in an Atlanta area intensive care unit after attending Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June.
From Reuters:
Cain, 74, was diagnosed with the disease in late June and later hospitalized after attending a Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally for President Donald Trump, where many attendees crowded close together without wearing face masks to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. [...]
Cain, who called himself an ABC man - “American Black Conservative” - had just started hosting a new show on Newsmax TV and hoped to play a role in the 2020 presidential election campaign, the statement said.
Cain started his career as a civilian employee for the U.S. Navy and worked for Pillsbury and Burger King before becoming chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza.
I don't feel the urge to dunk on a dead man, only to say that this was preventable just as nearly all of our coronavirus deaths have been preventable past a certain point.
We knew the death toll from Trump's unmasked rally would be greater than zero and Herman Cain is just the most high profile death that can be linked to the event, not the only death.
The pandemic may have caught us by surprise at one point, but that was a long time ago now. The first Americans were infected in January and Cain was infected nearly seven months later in June. And even now, with 155,000 deaths and counting, some Americans still do not take it seriously. One of our two political parties doesn't take it seriously.
America is the richest country in the world, but we're also the dumbest country where nearly 40 percent of the people do not even believe in empirical reality. And maybe these two things go hand-in-hand. Maybe the average (white) American has had too much privilege in life to know what reality is for most of the world.
Herman Cain and every other Republican would have worn a mask if Trump directly told them to instead of leading the movement against masks and against taking the virus seriously. Tens of thousands of deaths didn't have to happen.
This will be Trump's legacy.