Like millions of Americans, my life was forever altered by the COVID pandemic as I lost people I knew and had my own autoimmune disease triggered by this vicious virus.
Four and a half years ago, we had an incompetent president caught off guard by a deadly pathogen that began overseas and gave us plenty of warning of the carnage that lay ahead.
Our leader then, Donald Trump, failed at the one crisis he faced. As a result, more than a million Americans died, and tens of millions of others like me have long-term diseases.
The economy nearly collapsed. The stock market plummeted. Unemployment skyrocketed, businesses failed and our way of life was forever altered.
While many question the cognitive skills of President Biden, isn’t about 50% of our country suffering from collective amnesia — not recalling what a shambles our country was in the last year of Trump’s presidency?
Yet, many want an encore performance of a leader whose errors led to the deaths of more Americans than the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars combined.
History may not repeat itself, but it surely rhymes.
I keep on thinking what would our country’s climate — and the globe’s — look like if America had elected Al Gore 24 years ago instead of George W. Bush?
Gore had been ringing alarms about global warming before that campaign. Six years later, his award-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” brought this slow-motion train wreck to worldwide attention.
The eye-opening film put the lie to those who said global warming is a myth. It showed the melting of glaciers and presented the scary health implications if greenhouse gases are not reduced.
To paraphrase a favorite saying: “How’d that 2000 election work out for you?”
The election of 2000 was a tipping point: It set the stage for the decline of America in the 21st century. Since then, our country has suffered its worst terrorist attack ever (9/11), experienced the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression (2008) and was devastated by the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu (2020).
I don’t need to remind you which party was in power during all three of those epochal disasters.
In 2000, American voters walked into polling booths in November coming off a decade of solid economic growth and the world was a much safer place in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of communism and the Soviet Union.
But because of our misguided president, we quickly had a clash of civilizations with the Islamic world, a deep slide into a cataclysmic economic crisis and initiated a false and ill-fated invasion of Iraq that still reverberates in the chaotic Middle East.
We are at a similar inflection point in our history. Trump wants to continue energy policies that favor big oil and coal — fossil fuels that are killing the planet.
Donald Trump wants to rein in inflation by slapping trade tariffs on all imported goods and extending tax cuts for billionaires, who certainly don’t need more help from the rigged economic rules of the past four decades.
Donald Trump wants to discontinue alliances with European and Asian allies which has managed to contain rising authoritarian aggression coming from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Gore was not a charismatic candidate, not unlike the Democratic standard bearer today. Bush was a clueless politician, whose misguided world view set us on a dangerous path. His successor in the GOP, Donald Trump, has similar weaknesses and so many more. His term was even more damaging to our nation’s health, world standing and our democratic ideals.
As you trudge through the scorching heat this summer, think about how important your vote for president is and how much better off our planet would be if we had a President Al Gore.
And remember the horrors of 2020, the year we were all locked in our homes in fear, watching hapless President Trump allow a foreign invasion of a microscopic pathogen kill more than 1 million Americans and severely sicken many millions more while suggesting “it’ll go away soon,” or advancing quack cures like bleach injections or hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin — all unscientific attempts to wish away a deadly public health epidemic.
Do we really want to repeat the traumas of the past by electing an incompetent president again? My memories and fear of Trump’s reign of error are still intact and I vote an emphatic no.
Allon is the founder of City & State and the 5Boro Institute. He was a candidate for NYC mayor in 2013.